


Flicker, Fade

by everythingintransit



Category: All Time Low, Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, Panic! at the Disco, Pierce the Veil, Sleeping With Sirens, Tonight Alive, We Are the In Crowd
Genre: (but not much), Abuse, Depression, Eating Disorders, F/F, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Self-Harm, a major character, character death but nothing like, includes lots of fun things like:, it was my angst dump fic, mention of rape, sooo this is really emo and sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-05
Updated: 2017-06-05
Packaged: 2018-11-09 04:11:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 22
Words: 80,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11096619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/everythingintransit/pseuds/everythingintransit
Summary: - In which a group of kids at a boarding school have no idea what they're doing with their lives and are all on the somewhat same level of confusion and apathy for everything. It doesn't help that everyone's got some sort of mystery to them. Tay disappears for long periods of time at least twice a week, Vic is trapped in a scary relationship, Ryan isn't sure of anything in life which they fight by running too much, and Kellin eats too much and can't sleep because of nightmares which might have to do with the scars all over his arms."It's hard when you're living and you don't feel much, and you're down and you're hurting because you don't feel loved."[Named after the song "Flicker, Fade" by Taking Back Sunday]





	1. The Rhythm Of Night

**Author's Note:**

> welcome to this pile of shit. it's up on my wattpad (i'm posting it here on ao3 just for more reads #sorrynotsorry) which is @/demolitioniero. love me! .. if that's what you want to do...  
> aaanyways every chapter is named after some emo stupid song and this first chapter is the rhythm of night by vinyl theater. lyrics are from the same song. i'll put warnings if there's anything that may be ~triggering~ in the chapter but there's nothing in the first chapter. cool.

Rain sobbed down into the chilly night, turning bright lights into simple blurs of color; turning sharp city skyline into a dazzling, obscure mess of buildings. San Francisco was beautiful at night. It was especially beautiful that night, and Jack Barakat couldn't remember why he had ever missed his home of Baltimore. Of course, the harbor filled with huge ships that only encouraged his imagination to create irrational fears of his body being crushed by the immense ships was his home, and would always be. Baltimore was a city of everything, full of diversity, tourists, and fantastic museums. The snow streaked streets that were empty and lonely on cold winter days that froze the East Coast, the streets that he had roamed with the one person that was home to him, that was his home. And while he had grown attached to the bright city that proudly sat on the West Coast, near the top of California, Jack still loved his home city. Along with loving Baltimore, Jack also loved Alexander William Gaskarth. No matter where Jack was, he was at home with Alex by his side. So when the pair showed up to a city on the other side of the country, a city of lights and love and creativity, full of inspiration, beauty, and utter genius, they were, and had a right to be, completely overwhelmed. The two teenagers from the humble state of Maryland had gotten lost in the neon San Francisco lights, spending one of the greatest years of their life floating adrift, learning, loving, and figuring out how to live life.

Three years later, a cold blast of rain soaked the two boys, who were starting their senior year of high school the very next morning. However, their young hearts were stuck in place, not willing to let go of the summer that had been seemingly infinite until they came to terms with the fact that school was restarting in only a matters of hours. As the rain poured down over their heads, the couple sat in the middle of Alamo Square, watching the blurry lights reflect in the bay, nodding their heads in time to the sweet, sweet sound of blink-182.

Jack had sprawled out on the wet grass with his eyes closed, smiling as the rain soaked his body even more. Some people didn't like rain, but Jack just didn't like the atmosphere associated with rain. Cold, grey, and dull weather was never Jack's taste. However, he loved the feeling of rain on his skin. Maybe if it could properly rain with the sun out, if it could rain with no clouds and no dark haze, maybe that would be the most magical thing in the world. He would enjoy that. Jack craved the enchanting feeling of cloudbursts of water soaking his clothes, sticking the fabric on his body right to his skin, matting his hair down, turning the ground into a slippery, muddy mess. For some reason, Jack craved the chaos, and surprising peace, that rain brought with it, and he was completely enjoying the feeling of the fairly heavy downpour on his skin.

Wasting Time echoed through the empty park, and Jack smiled, mouthing the words as Alex sang them. Alex's voice was absolute bliss, a wonder that Jack would never cease to love. Alex was sitting up, tossing his head back and forth as he sang. A glow-stick crown ringed his long brown hair, lighting up his face in neon green and purple colors. Jack yawned, rolling onto his side.

"Jack, get up." Alex instructed, stopping his sweet serenade. Jack opened his eyes, automatically smiling when he saw Alex's face. Alex had been Jack's friend until he had became Jack's best friend until he had became Jack's boyfriend. But he was more than a friend, more than a best friend, more than a boyfriend. There weren't words to describe the relationship they had, even though they were only 17 years old. Though they had exchanged the words "I love you," too many times to count, it was always being constantly thought in their heads. And when Jack opened his eyes to see his wonderful, perfect boyfriend beaming at him, he thought it right then. I love you. Alex had hopped to his feet, grabbing Jack's hand and pulling him up. Always by blink had started playing, and Alex grabbed Jack's hands- and then they were dancing. It was an eccentric kind of dancing, with too many twirls and slipping on the soaked grass and Alex was whispering "always," into Jack's ear, giving him goosebumps. The rain poured down overhead and time had stopped.

Alex's phone would read the time to be a few hours past midnight, and everything was absolutely amazing. Jack started laughing as he shook his wet hair, smiling up at the cloudy night sky. Alex pulled him closer, pressing his soft lips against Jack's. The song had ended and Roller Coaster was playing and they kept on dancing, twirling around like drunk ballerinas in stupid shoes. The lights twinkling over the bay glittered and would always be preserved in that moment, like everything else that had happened over that summer.

Couldn't it just last forever?

::::::

It was an unsaid sort of rule that wasn't a rule, really, it was an unsaid thing that happened, well, to the point, the thing that happened was that new kids always found their way to the back of the cafeteria as if dragged on a string to hover nervously over Jack and Ryan's table like there was a barbed wire fence around it before managing to ask, "can I sit here?" On the first day of school, the pair had A lunch and Ryan got her usual cucumber and bread because Ryan ate cucumbers and bread for lunch on Mondays because she had a whole damn schedule worked out, and Jack ate sour cream and onion potato chips because he was the epitome of healthy and was obviously not at all bitter about school starting.

School was an unavoidable sort of torture that made Jack want to jump into a frozen over swimming pool. He would then play La Dispute's "First Reactions After Falling Through the Ice" as he turned into a spiky-haired chlorine icicle with a grand smile on his face that read "I DON'T HAVE TO GO TO SCHOOL EVER AGAIN BECAUSE I AM DEAD AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO TO STOP ME JAJAJAJAJAJAJA."

Ryan, on the other hand, didn't have a problem with school. She was a runner, and spent the mornings sweating and suffering down on the track. Well, she scowled when Jack said that she sweated and suffered and would often shake her head and say nothing while he went on and on in the background like on Portlandia. Except they were in San Francisco. Same coast, Jack thought. Ryan also liked photography and was a vegetarian and was all around healthier and better in every single way than Jack except he had a boyfriend. And Ryan was single as all hell and wasn't getting any less single by waiting for Brendon Urie to realize that she was ass over tits in love with him. Maybe not fully in love, but Ryan and Brendon were "best friends" except Brendon was clueless and Ryan was stupid and Jack had a proper boyfriend, so Ryan had nothing to say about that. Ever.

So Ryan was eating her cucumber like it was a granola bar and it kept crunching and spraying water everywhere, while Jack ruined his skin with his greasy ass chips. And then someone wandered by them, looking confused but not the helpless sort just kind of the overall, basic confused look. She had puffy brown hair that Ryan could do favors with by clicking her tongue and calling unfortunate. She was wearing a black shirt with a, wait for it, red La Dispute logo flower on it. Ryan was immediately on edge and watching, because anyone wearing a La Dispute shirt was someone to invite to the table, After looking around for a bit and eventually shrugging, the girl approached Jack and Ryan's table.

"Can I sit here?" It was asked casually, as if it wouldn't matter if they said no. Ryan shot Jack a look that clearly said "no Mean Girls references will be tolerated here." Jack hadn't really been planning on using the "you can't sit with us" line in a valley girl voice before giggling and laughing and brushing it off and then saying "no, of course you can sit was us," and no, god, of course he hadn't done that before and completely embarrassed Ryan. Never in his life. Of course not.

"Yeah, sure." Ryan said. It was exactly what Ryan said and did, yup, that was her, "yeah, sure," words spoken in a sulky tone when she was obviously excited about something that Jack was sure to imitate later on. The girl sat down and did that weird smile where she raised her eyebrows and turned her mouth up weird, the polite smile that people who are kind of friends give each other when passing each other in the halls in between classes.

"I'm Tay." She said.

"I'm Jack."

"And I'm Ryan. You're new, then?" Ryan asked, making absolutely shocking small talk. It was never, ever, normal of her to willingly initiate a conversation with anyone. Jack couldn't even remember how he and her had ended up as friends.

"Yeah, if you couldn't already tell. I have no idea what to do. This school is so weird compared to my old one." Jack felt like barging in and pointing out that it was a boarding school and things were a tiny bit different when you lived on the campus of where you went to school, but decided against it. He was just in a bad mood because he was eating bad chips under the too-bright lights of the cafeteria while Alex was probably hurting his hand by taking too many notes because he always did that under the too-bright lights of a smelly and cold classroom and neither of them deserved to have to do that, and really, Jack just wasn't ready to let go of the summer. He wasn't sure if he would ever be. Maybe on the last day of school, he would be ready to let go of the previous summer and accept the next one. Except he would have to actually deal with college applications and that one he sort of wanted to really go to but they wanted him to commit if he wanted to go and god, he couldn't just commit to one certain college, that was selfish, but it was a school and they would accept him because his grades were fairly decent and-

"You can just sit with us. We're nice people."

"For the most part," Jack mumbled, and Tay laughed a bit but it was awkward and Ryan was getting the "oh my god stop you're embarrassing me" look on her face. "Anyways, where'd you move from?"

"Generic small down in New York," Tay said, shoving her bag around with her feet. "This city is so different compared to it." Jack and Ryan nodded but in a sort of, yeah I don't know what you're on about way. Tay seemed to catch onto this, and changed the topic.

"So, where are you guys from?"

"Baltimore." "Vegas." Tay laughed.

"Not small towns then." More head shakes. It was getting kind of awkward, and before Ryan could add in her input about Tay's La Dispute shirt, Jack spotted the next poor soul who was about to sit down at their table whether he liked it or not. He looked confused, and this was the very and extremely helpless kind. Although Tay had a casual sort of "I'll just stand in the hall and look at my phone and my stomach is growling yes but I'm not hungry and I refuse to eat out here," air about her, this was the kind of guy who probably thought finding a place to sit at lunch was the most important part of his whole entire life.

As he wandered closer and closer to their table, Jack almost felt sorry for him just by instinct because there was no way he wasn't going to get through even a week without being stared at or laughed at in some way. He would be the designated fat kid of the grade and Jack got that from the look Ryan shot him, one that was harder to read than the rest of them, but one that he got enough out of.

The thing was, this kid looked absolutely terrified and kept twisting his hands together like he was trying to knit, but not really, and his shirt was too small and his sweatshirt was too big and he didn't have any idea where he was going, so Jack just said-

"Hey! Come sit with us." The kid gawked at him like he had just spoken a sentence in some alien language but neither of them knew they spoke and they would build a romance over it because only they could understand only each other so it got kind of lonely and they would have kids and their kids would speak it too and then they would all breed a whole alien life force on earth but no one knew they were aliens and- he was going to say "what?" He was going to. Jack waited for it, almost counted on his fingers.

"Sorry?" God, so close.

"Sit with us." The kid came closer to the table, and sat down a seat away from Jack. He had nice eyes. They were very pretty, blue and green and grey mixed together into a bright pretty color that looked unimaginably dull and tired in his face. But they were like the earth. A whole world just reflected in his eyes, and he had to go and be sad and have dark circles under them that sort of took all of the life and bright background lighting out of them. All of him seemed tired, the way he dragged his feet and the anxiety that seemed to pulse from him whether he liked it or not. He stared around as if he had been trained to and that was the only thing he knew how to do, and Jack saw that his hands were shaking. He wasn't wearing a La Dispute shirt, unfortunately, instead just wore one that was just, way too small for him. The way he kept tugging it down did him no good because it drew attention to just how fat he actually was, like just pull your damn pants up, man. And he smelled bad, too. His hair was greasy, his skin was oily and a bit sweaty near his hair, and he was wearing that ugly ass too small shirt and his lips were all bloody and scabbed and he seemed a lot worse off and probably the accurate description of a depressed teenager who had been evicted from his own house to go live at a boarding school down the coast because he had a complete mental breakdown and now he wasn't sure if his mind was even working again. Or, in Jack's words or mind, he was a mess.

"Hi." Jack said.

"Hi," the kid said, his voice a breathy light thing that was hesitant and sort of terrible and calm at the same time.

"I'm Jack." The kid pulled his hand back to mess with his hair and the sleeve of his sweatshirt slipped down a bit. His skin was so pale. What if he was a vampire?

"I'm Ryan and-"

"I'm Tay." The kid looked as though he was being ambushed, and stared around at them.

"Kellin. I'm Kellin. That's me." Ryan went back to her cucumber and bread while Jack thought up things to say.

"Where'd you move from?" Ryan rolled her eyes and Kellin looked like he was going to throw up with the proposition of having to answer a question.

"O-O, uh, um, yeah, Oregon. This... town."

"Yes!" Whisper shouted Tay, and leaned across the table to give Kellin a high five. He hit her hand but it was so gentle that he had basically just poked it. "They were talking about how they're from big cities so we're the small town people. We have to stay together, people like us." She was joking, that was obvious, but Kellin bit at his lip and nodded like he was talking to a teacher or some other easily dislikable person. A normal human maybe would have tried a smile but Kellin didn't risk that.

"Oh, wait." Tay looked across the cafeteria with a sinking look on her face and turned back to Kellin. "You don't have food, do you want to wait in the lunch line with me?" Ryan started on her soggy bread, and Jack winked at her from across the table. She smiled back. Their friendship was odd. Kellin once again looked like someone had just pulled a gun on him, and tugged so hard at the bottom of his shirt that Jack was certain that it would rip.

"Oh-I, um, I mean-I. Sure, I- I guess, I can. If, I, if you really- want, I mean, if you want me to." God, it took him a while to get a sentence out.

"Yes, I do. I don't like waiting alone. We're friends now." She stated, and this seemed to be directed to the entire table. Ryan and Jack nodded and Tay hopped out of her chair and started across the cafeteria, with Kellin following behind her. The weight around his hips shifted when he walked. Jack imagined that he wasn't going to have a fun time in P.E. Ryan glanced across the table at Jack with a look that read "tell me what you think of them."

"She likes La Dispute." Ryan announced as if it was a big thing that none of them knew about. Jack nodded to confirm that Tay, indeed, did like La Dispute. But that didn't really matter to him because anyone could like La Dispute and he was interested in Kellin, not in a creepy way, just interested because not everyone was like... him.

"Kellin has pretty eyes," Jack replied. Ryan looked at him with a weird expression on her face and just said-

"You really are gay." Jack giggled in a very gay way, and replied with-

"Well, I do have a boyfriend." And Ryan screwed up her face in a smile and said,

"Don't remind me."


	2. A Daydream Away

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> this here chapter is named after the song a daydream away by all time low, 2nd best band on the earth. loves of my life. i've met them and seen them and will have seen them twice in august i'd die for, alex gaskarth and rian dawson and jack barakat. zack merrick can suck my ass.  
> no warnings for this one. have fun.

Taylor Jardine had never expected to be so intimidated by something as trivial as a city, but soon came to the realization that she didn't know how public transport worked, hadn't realized that hospitals were different here, and hadn't been aware that people there were colder and were less willing to make conversation. After all, she had grown up in the most unimportant town in all of New York that she had never really ever left, and moving to a big city to figure out by herself when her whole world had become a carpet to be dragged out from under her feet was never going to be easy and quick to adapt to.

She had lost everything.

Her house, her town, her friends, her family, all of it had disappeared in the past year and none of it was going to come back, her dad was never coming back and her mom was too far gone and her sister, god, her sister. Her sister was stuck in a hospital bed and would be for the rest of her life, just a little kid who deserved to go see the Golden Gate bridge and deserved to walk around a big city because she had always talked about how when she grew up she wanted to live in New York where there were skyscrapers and opportunities for everyone but no, Avery Jardine could only see the view from the small windows in her hospital room and that was all she'd ever see.

It didn't help that the people at this school were weird and odd and all had their own things going on, back at home she had had completely selfless friends who dedicated more of their time to her than she had ever even asked for, but she hadn't complained. Now her friends were sort of either caught up in their own lives or just bitter and strange. Her roommate, Jenna, was an Australian girl who was harboring an obviously massive crush on Tay, and she was ungodly hyper, which left Ryan as the best option for a friend. Ryan was serious but not, not always, she had a sense of humor and a good taste in music and seemed a good deal more sane than anyone else.

Jenna was always acting as though she had drowned five cups of coffee and eaten an entire bag of jolly ranchers, though no one was saying that she hadn't, Jack was for the most part okay but sort of odd in his own way, and Kellin, well, Kellin was the next best thing, Tay supposed. Although he was quiet and anxious, he made good conversation when he actually decided to talk, and was a cool and nice person. Him and Tay had English in the mornings together and Science at the end of the day, which was nice because neither of them had any other friends in their classes. 

Yet something was wrong with Kellin and this was obvious after knowing him for a week because he always looked like he hadn't slept in months, and Tay wasn't going to go assuming that he had, and there were four huge terrible scars down his right forearm which sat amongst a vast collection of scars that were still scary and worrying, just on a much smaller scale. She ate dinner with him and Ryan sometimes, they would sit in the commons and eat soup and gossip about the science teacher's fish, (yes, he had a huge aquarium in the back of his classroom) and Tay had noticed the way he drifted off when conversations went on without him and the way he got lost in his own sort of different world where things might have been better or worse, but no one would know because it was his own head.

He was kind, reserved, and ultimately an interesting person who never held a boring conversation because if it ever got too boring, he would just tune out. Which was a good quality because sometimes Tay sort of said embarrassing things that she didn't need anyone to hear but they always came after lengthy rambles that always started nowhere and ended up nowhere and were just big useless wastes of time. 

Tay hadn't visited her mom since she had last seen her earlier on in the summer when they had first left each other. They had been at the weird, unfriendly hospital after leaving Avery for the night, and Tay's mom had said something about how she was proud of Tay and Tay had nodded at the floor as if a way to show that the ugly scuffed floor was more respectable than her mom. In a way, it sort of was. Somehow, Tay had decided that she was obliged to visit her mom since it wasn't like her mom could just show up at her school without any complications, and checked the proper hospital's visiting hours to see if she could sneak in a visit to Avery after her mom. Visiting hours hadn't applied for her back in New York, they knew her there and they knew about everything, and she hadn't even minded how personal it had gotten there. She had broken down in nurses arms, screamed and cried and gone through whole ranges of emotions in front of doctors, and had spent many long nights going back and forth from different wings of the hospital to visit her dad and her little sister. All through this, her mom had sat at home with all the curtains drawn and the lights off and never said anything that would help her daughter. 

Coming home had been the worst, getting a ride from Cam or Rob or someone because they were the ones who didn't mind 3 AM calls and had licenses, it was the worst to have them look at her once bright house so dark and broken down. They had their families doing fine, every few years someone got pneumonia or the flu or a bad cold, they only visited the hospital to visit old grandpa or for broken bones from sports or backyard accidents. Yeah, they had spent a lot of time sitting in Avery's little hospital room with plenty of windows and drawings on the walls and talking to her and trying to smile but in the end, there was nothing they could really do for Tay, there was nothing anyone could really do for Tay and she knew it.

So there was still a passive aggressive sense of hatred implanted in her heart and brain for her mom, but it had died down a decent amount once she had gotten to boarding school and she realized that most everyone was there because someone, at some point, had given up on them. That Ryan basically had no family to speak of, that Jack's family wouldn't speak to him, that Kellin's family was a very big mess that he only spoke of in a tone used for talking sense into homophobes and racist people, and that Jenna had only ever known her mom but all she had gotten from her was money and phone calls twice a year. There, Tay felt sort of like she belonged.

It wasn't a bad feeling at all.

After a long conversation with the school counselor, Tay had gotten a pass to miss all of science class in order to visit her mom and stick in Avery's visiting hours. Kellin followed her to the office, unaware that she was abandoning him when she was his only friend in that class and that he would be alone with no partner to do a lab that day. Oh well. Kellin had been somewhat confused when Tay had broken the news that she had a "doctors appointment" to go to and had sort of just ran off, and Tay would have been too.

But she had to put on nice clothes. 

Dressing up wasn't something that Tay was good at, but she had a small collection of clothes that could be considered "nice." "Nice" was really what her mom had used to consider fancy, clothes that Tay would be forced into when her mom was trying to impress someone. The clothing that her mom had never really approved of was Tay's usual attire: skinny jeans and some sort of t-shirt, either a band one or one with a sort of confusing pun. That day, Tay changed into a skirt, an uncomfortable sleeveless shirt that was made out of some weird fabric, and a jacket. A jacket. Even the word jacket was enough to make Tay shudder, jackets were horrible phenomenons. Coats, sweaters, hoodies, sure! But jackets weren't cool, not at all. Tay didn't like jackets, but she still put one on. She hated it. Looking at herself in the mirror, she decided that she looked presentable enough, after all, it was really only just for her mom.

Besides, her mom had changed quite a bit since she cared about other people's clothing, and probably wouldn't even care about what Tay was wearing. Apathy was the strongest emotion associated with her and had been for more years than Tay could chose to count, and she came to realize that her mom wouldn't care at all about what she was wearing. When she was nervous, Tay's hands got sweaty and clammy. Closing the door to her room left a sweaty palm mark on the metal handle of her door, and her fingers trembled as they returned her room key to the pocket of her jacket. Walking down the hall and out of the collection of buildings she assumed was called a dorm or something of the sort, she took a deep breath of cool air. San Francisco summers were cold, a relieving change from New York's sweltering summers. However, breathing chilly air did little to calm her down. Her brown eyes connected with the ground as she walked, concentrating on each little fleck in the cement. The sidewalk was disgusting, she decided. Turning up her nose at the abominable colors of the ground beneath her feet, her mind wandered, and she wondered about why whoever made sidewalks didn't make them in nice colors. Glancing up at the sky, which was a hideous bright grey color, she squinted and frowned, knowing exactly what kind of horrible day she was going to have.

On the bus, her hands kept getting sweatier and she couldn't remember the last time she had been this nervous. Nothing on the bus was fascinating or important enough to distract her from the terrifying thoughts of how everything was going to go wrong, and her stop came all too soon. Exiting the bus and being forced to walk down another ugly sidewalk, Tay wondered if she was going to cry. Tay was a strong person, as strong as she could be- but today was just going to be a big mess. The building came into view, and Tay stopped, picking at the sleeves of her jacket and wondering if she should just go back to the school. Running her hands through her formerly neat brown hair, she took a deep breath. She knew that her dad would want her to do this. There was nobody else who was going to, so it was up to Tay and her fragile heart to manage this. Realizing that she was the only person who was able to carry out what she was meant to do brought her a new sort optimism that did a decent job of calming her nerves. Rocking back and forth on her toes, she gave herself a short pep talk, ones that she often gave to herself whenever things in her head got out of hand. Avery was going to get a visit too, and visiting her little sister was always nice, to give the kid company for once, but it was always sad to see the life wearing out of her.

"You are going to go in there, and go see her, and talk to her, and not make her feel guilty, and act normal, and you're gonna be fine," Tay told herself, clenching her hands into fists and taking deep breaths. "You've got this."

She threw her shoulders back, cracked her knuckles in the same passionate way that Jack also did, and marched inside the building. If she hadn't built herself a false sense of courage, Tay would have been terrified. But she held her head up high, and approached with a bright, fake smile on her face.

"Last name?" Asked the apathetic looking nurse at the front desk, dressed in a dingy blueish uniform with a knitted pink thing thrown over it. It looked like one of her grandma's old rugs, and she was almost about to mention that until she realized that she was thinking completely irrationally and had to calm herself down or else she would end up telling her mom that she was gay and then running back inside to make out with the nurse (who, contrarily, was not make out material) and then running off to the hospital with a huge gay tail growing out of her ass.

That was what happened when Tay got nervous. A huge gay tail grew out of her ass. She almost started giggling at that, her imagination doing wonders to calm her down.

"Jardine," Tay finally answered, glancing around the room.

"You're visiting?" No shit, she was checking herself in.

"Yep." The nurse, a girl with a ridiculous dye job was snapping bubble gum in her mouth, and gave Tay a dirty look. She clicked around on her computer, snapped her gum again, and gave Tay another condescending glare.

"Alright, go with Lucinda over there- Lucinda!" She screamed. Lucinda appeared, looking overwhelmed and confused. A mess of curly blonde hair hung around her head, and she seemed frazzled and overwhelmed, emotions that Tay would totally be able to relate to if she wasn't totally and completely busy being happy and confident.

"Yes?" Asked Lucinda, her voice a high pitched squeak.

"Take her to the visiting area. She's here for Lisa." Lucinda, who looked around the same age as Tay, nodded and smiled at Tay, motioning for her to follow her. She nervously followed Lucinda down the hall, re-hashing her pep talk in her head. Before she knew it, Tay was face to face with her mother. The two looked at each other, not exactly knowing what to say.

"Do you want to go outside? It looks nice outside. Is it nice outside?" Tay's mom, Lisa, asked.

"Yeah, yeah it is." Tay nervously followed her mom outside, sitting down next to her on a bench. It was nice outside, cool and dim, "wine weather," her mom would have once called it.

"So how are you? How is school? Do you have friends?"

"Yeah. Yeah, um, there's this girl Ryan, she's nice. And these guys Kellin and Jack. And Jenna, she's my roommate. She's Australian. How are you?" Tay knew how the time was going to be spent, exchanging things that had happened that were meaningless and stupid. She had to visit though, and some of the guilt wore off of her as she spoke to her mom.

"I'm oh, oh I'm good. It's nice here."

"Are you feeling better?" Lisa looked surprised, jumping a bit.

"Oh, um, yes? No, maybe, I'm not sure. Better than before."

"Well that's good." Unfortunately, the two spent almost an hour exchanging vague questions and tales, making trivial small talk. It was at the point when they were talking about Avery when Tay's mom said flat out, "I think you should go." Of course, Avery was a touchy topic, but Tay was up for talking about her if she had to. It was something that they had to talk about, but Lisa only would talk about Avery if it was necessary. Which, evidently, it wasn't. As Tay left, her mom hesitated before saying anything.

"I love you," she squeaked out, guilt wrapping around her heart. Pride rushed through her when she saw her daughter, who could actually properly deal with life, no matter what it threw at her. Tay paused at the door, not turning around.

"Love you too."

::::::

"I love you," so much easier to speak when Tay was sitting in a little hospital room that had sadly begun to feel like home. Tay's little sister Avery lay in the hospital bed, the one she never left anymore. Her small, thin face smiled up at Tay. Avery was having a good day, one which Tay would presently realize to be one of the last good days of her life. Since Avery was unable to go to school, her days were fully spent in the hospital, listening to music that Tay recommended, watching shows and videos that Tay recommended, and reading books that Tay recommended. She idolized Tay to the best of her ability, and was always as excited as she could be to hear Tay's stories. 

Tay told her about Jenna, who wore chokers and had really pretty blonde hair and was all the way from Australia. Then she told her about Ryan, an alternative kid who liked to run and was a total photography nerd. Avery said that she thought Ryan was cool. She said that she wanted to meet Ryan. Tay knew that she had to make that happen. Then Tay told her about Jack, who was a boy and had an earring, only one from what Tay could tell, and had spiky hair and had a weird way of speaking and told funny jokes. Avery said that she wanted to meet Jack too. And then Tay told her about Kellin, who seemed kind of sad but was kind and always had interesting things to say when he actually talked. Avery said that Ryan and Jack seemed nice, and that Kellin seemed boring and Jenna seemed intimidating. She then went to bragging about knowing the word intimidating. That day had started off bad and ended well, so when Tay left around seven, she spoke the words "I love you," and meant all three of them. Tay had promised to bring Jack and Ryan to meet her, and Avery had vowed to go hunting in the thesaurus for more words. Tay told her to listen to Brand New, Avery said she would. And Tay left, still wearing the dreaded jacket that her mother had said nothing about.

Jenna was there when she got back, and Tay was surprised to see Jack and another boy in their room, all huddled together over Jenna's laptop propped on a pillow on the ground.

"Oh, hi." She spoke awkwardly and suddenly, and they all turned around; Jack reacted to seeing her first.

"Hi, Tay! We knew you'd be back soon. Jenna wanted to start betting on when you would be back but Alex and I are broke so we can't, really. We have Chinese food!" Jack smiled at her, and Tay was glad that he existed; he was just such a nice person.

"Um, I already ate," she said, slightly disappointed. She had been willing Jenna to be out somewhere else so Tay could've just curled up under her blankets, listened to The Killers, and cried herself to sleep.

"Oh, we can always go if you want," Jenna said quickly, seeing the look on Tay's face. Despite her sort of creepiness and hyper demeanor, Jenna knew what was up and was sort of strikingly pretty and, well, Tay had never had a problem with her. The other boy, who had shaggy brown hair that had an unappealing pink streak down the front and horribly thick eyebrows gave Tay a small wave, smiling at her. Tay wanted them to go, but didn't want to be rude. Jenna shut her laptop, standing up and stretching.

"We'll go. I want to go. Come on guys, let's go." Jack and company got up too, collecting their food as well.

"I'm Alex, by the way," company said, standing oddly close to Jack. Then Tay saw the way that Jack looked at him, and realized that Jack and company were totally gay for each other.

"I'm Tay," she mumbled, glad to have Jenna as a roommate as she cleared them out. The door shut behind the trio, and Tay ripped off her jacket and the shirt underneath, putting on an oversized grey t-shirt that smelled like home, a smell she knew she would never be able to experience again. New York was gone, hours and miles away, and San Francisco was now. This was her home, room 218 at Bay Ridge Boarding School, this was her home now and that was something she was going to have to get used to. She pulled off her skirt, tossing the hated clothes into a pile on the floor. With her legs bare and cold, she snapped off the lights and fell into bed, the depressing thoughts about Avery already in her mind. All she could think of was how her sister was slowly dying, and one day her face wouldn't be as bright, and she might go blind, and she would be dead within the year. Tears slid down her face as she curled up under the blankets, wishing that it was her in that hospital bed instead of Avery. There was no way she could change anything about it.

Avery was going to die.

Her mom was going to spiral out of control again. Everyone was going to find out, Jenna was going to ask what she had done that day and Tay would say she had been at this "home" where her mom was because she wasn't able to take care of herself because her sister was dying and her dad was dead and everyone in that family's mental state was slowly deteriorating, and at the hospital with her little sister whose life was slowly fading out of her because of fucking San Filippo syndrome, something that Tay should have had, but didn't. Tay's breathing finally tapered off into one with a substantial rhythm, and she fell asleep to the sound of her own heartbeat.


	3. Princeton Ave

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> this one's named after this song called princeton ave by this cool ass band called issues. there's descriptions of abuse in here mind yourself.

Vic Fuentes hadn't been a jumpy person until he had, really, become a jumpy person. It wasn't as if he had woken up one day and decided that he wanted to be scared of just about everything and was going to flinch at the slightest movement that anyone made that could regard him, it had sort of developed over time but had steadily gotten worse, like his math grade. There was a sort of paranoia that hung over him; a wary glance from his dark eyes could easily show that. With the anxiousness that had become a part of his life, there was also a scorching hatred that burned deep down inside him, a hatred for himself and a hatred for the fucking monster who constantly repeated meaningless words and continued doing things that meant far too much.

Vic had grown to detest everything about his own life, because there wasn't anything he could cling on to that would prevent him from completely disintegrating into something that wasn't even him anymore . Everything was falling apart, and he was standing in the middle of the wreckage, assuring himself and everyone around him that he was fine. He got the questions almost too often, a quick glance and then an, "are you alright?" There was nothing else to say other than, "I'm fine," and nothing more. It had been that way with the people he had thought were his friends, and god, he wasn't allowed to blame them. The only person that he could blame was the person that he wasn't allowed to blame, which made things so much worse. When he had stopped answering people's texts and avoiding them outside of classes and trying to talk to them as little as possible when he did see them, of course they had asked if things were okay and maybe a few words exchanged between him and them did enough damage that he would have to block their phone numbers and get in trouble if he so much as looked at them.

All in all, being vague was always the best bet when answering questions that one didn't want to answer, and Vic knew that far too well. Of course, there was one person who never asked if Vic was okay. That person was the one who actually needed to ask that question. That one person, that stupid, fucking, idiot was sitting right next to Vic, complaining about something trivial that Vic didn't care about. In his own head, Vic sounded violent and terrifying, the person he didn't want to be but all the pent up anger inside of him was never going to go anywhere if he didn't put it to good use, so all of it was let out through petty insults and whiny complains in his own head.

"Fuck, it's so annoying, don't you think?" Jaime whined, looking at Vic for an answer that he would approve of.

"Oh, yeah. Really annoying. Yeah." It wasn't the answer that Jaime would have wanted, not in the slightest, but Vic didn't want to make an effort that day. He was tired from school and the inevitable stress of being in a relationship with someone he didn't love. Impressing Jaime wasn't something that was making itself any sort of importance anymore, and so Vic listened to what his brain wasn't telling him to do.

"Are you even listening to me?" Vic felt like he was being grilled by a teacher after zoning out in class. He stared blankly at Jaime, trying to remember anything that his boyfriend had just said. Boyfriend was the wrong word for what their relationship was, really, but Vic had grown to not care about all the comma splices in his writing that his English teacher wouldn't stop complaining about and with that he had also stopped caring about what he called Jaime, so he kept not fixing his comma splices and kept letting someone who had once told him "I love you" hurt him. Compared to each other, they were basically the same level of wrong.

"Dumbass." Jaime muttered. Vic made a sound of protest, and Jaime had immediately turned back to him with that sneer that Vic hated so much. "Sorry, did you have something to say?" Vic always had something to say, he had so much that he could have said right there and then but he wasn't that stupid, and instead toned down his ideas into something less hateful than they could be.

"It'd just be nice if you didn't have to insult me all the time." Vic cursed himself, wishing he hadn't uttered those words at all. Sometimes he sounded like a middle aged white woman talking to her husband, and those were the times when he most regretted his words.

"Oh, you don't want insults? You wouldn't hear them if you didn't deserve them. So if you could stop being such a fucking dumbass, you wouldn't hear so much about it. Right?" Jaime's hands were on Vic's arm, pressing down into his skin. Vic nodded, afraid that anything he would say would be the wrong thing. He didn't have to worry about it though, everything he said was always the wrong thing. With Jaime, there was never anything right to be said. "Answer me," Jaime spat, his hands undoubtedly leaving ugly bruises to show up later on Vic's arm.

"I deserve to be insulted, I'm sorry." God, Vic hated saying those words. At first, he had had to say them, and had spoken them through gritted teeth and with a scowl on his face. Nowadays, he was starting to believe that what he was saying was true, why else would he be saying it so often?

"That's it? I'm sorry?"

"I'm sorry, I'm stupid, I am."

"Do you think that's going to fucking cut it?" Jaime was far too close for comfort and Vic couldn't help to squeak out,

"What will cut it?"

::::::

Vic Fuentes wasn't really sure what was happening. Everything was blurry, and his feet weren't steady on the ground. The hallway bent and twisted in front of him, and he leaned back against a wall that wasn't there. Nearly falling, he realized and knew that he had to make it back to his room, and from there then he didn't know what would happen. Maybe he would pass out again. That might not be the worst thing. 

Yet the doorknob seemed to be avoiding his hand and he ended up slamming his palm against the door, just hoping Kellin was there because if he wasn't then Vic was going to have an even harder time than he was having right then. A key to his room? What a strange concept. Thankfully, the door opened, and there was the automatically worried face of Kellin, taking in Vic's battered form. Vic slowly walked past Kellin on shaky legs, and didn't take his time in collapsing on the couch that he had found dumpster diving a few years ago.

His head was spinning and then Kellin was saying things that all flowed together in a mess of white noise that went right through Vic's head without him hearing anything. All of Vic's emotions seemed to be on and off all at once, somewhat similar to a light switch, and then suddenly he was crying with no means of stopping anytime soon. He was stupid and he deserved the bruises on his arms and the dizzy swirly feeling in his head and the warm blood dripping down the side of his head. Blood. There was blood on his head, and that was bad, and everything hurt and everything felt bad and Kellin was there and that concerned look on his face was even more concerned than ever but Vic didn't even care because all he could think about was fucking Jaime.

He felt bad that he had made Jaime mad, and he felt stupid that he had brought it upon himself to get hurt like this and he knew that it wasn't really his fault but then again, he didn't. Everything was his fault something and everything was Jaime's fault sometimes. Whose fault was it really? Who actually deserved the blame? Vic didn't know and Vic didn't care and Vic was used to blaming everything on himself and didn't need to change any of it. So Vic cried and cried until he drifted into some sort of unconsciousness which could have been sleep or passing out from the pain, but Vic didn't know and Vic didn't care and Vic just wished that he didn't exist.

::::::

Vic woke up with a raging headache and an odd sense of safety that made him confused and brought back memories of the two years that had been filled with the same sensation of happiness and security. He was on the couch where he had passed out the day before, but had his blanket thrown over him. Kellin wasn't there. Vic didn't want to get up, but he was craving something to kill the splintery pain behind his eyes. It felt like someone had stuck two toothpicks in his eyes and had slammed his face into a door. Nothing too gentle, of course. 

The few steps to the bathroom seemed more like miles. When he finally reached the bathroom, he slumped against the side of the cold sink and let out a heavy breath that he seemed to have been unknowingly holding at the sight of himself. A purple bruise ringed his eye and a cut down the side of his face was already scabbing over. The mere sight of how ridiculous he looked made him feel sick, because he had vowed to himself that he wouldn't let this happen anymore, and here he was, letting himself be hurt as if he had no respect for himself. Which, he supposed, he really didn't. In the end, he wasn't really sure if this was a matter of lack respect or himself or a lack of respect for himself. Allowing himself to be hurt was not him respecting himself, but if he did anything else to prevent it then he would be hurt even worse. 

He was trapped. It had come to the point where it was completely and totally out of control because every time he "threatened," to him, it wasn't threatening it was mentioning that maybe they should take a break from their relationship, Jaime started going on about how he would outright kill himself if Vic ever left. And though Jaime's actual threats were mainly empty and hung in the air after they were spoken, were met with hazy glares from the both of them, they still made enough sense to Vic to let him know that trying to leave wasn't in his best interests. Even if it was.

His ribs ached, and he wasn't surprised to see a huge bruise across his side when he managed to lift his shirt up. After probably blacking out at one point, he wasn't surprised that he didn't remember all of the gory details of the previous night.

Dropping his shirt back down, he basically fell onto the ground due to the appalling lack of control over his body to access the cabinets under the sink. After digging through them, he only came up with three orange prescription pill bottles that were completely unopened and full and did not belong him. He wondered if it would be better if they did, though. If he could just down a bottle of random prescription pills, he wondered if that would do anything to help him out. 

Yet suicide wasn't what he really had to be considering at that moment because it was, fucking, suicide, and Jaime was the one supposed to be thinking about killing himself, not Vic. Fuck. He was a wreck, an insensitive wreck who was looking at these random pill bottles as though he had been challenged to a staring contest by them. And the only other person who would be in charge of those pill bottles was Kellin, and if he was meant to be taking them, he was doing a fantastic job of avoiding them. Vic was squinting at the names on the bottles, wondering exactly what they were meant to do. Vic knew what Zoloft was, because Jaime always made countless extremely funny depression jokes, as if he could even ever understand what it was like to be completely unable to get out of bed in the mornings, due to physical things, like being covered in cuts and bruises, or mental things, like realizing that you're trapped in a relationship with someone who thinks that love consists of kisses that taste like blood and sex that feels forced.

The other bottles had labels that were worn off, which was strange, because they were still unopened.

So Vic got worried. He was a pretty anxious person, someone who spent too much time wondering about what others thought about certain things. It did make sense, seeing as he couldn't trust a single thing that his "boyfriend" said and was sometimes too afraid to go to sleep at night. So he worried about this, even though it was clearly none of his business and would probably be better left alone. And though he didn't believe in prescription medications at all, he still knew that if someone was meant to be taking something then they should just go ahead and take it.

He used the counter to pull himself up and slammed his shaking hands and the bottles on the counter as soon as the door slammed shut and then he jumped because what if it was Jaime? But no, it wasn't Jaime, it was just Kellin who needed to take his fucking meds because they were there for a reason and it was Kellin who Vic realized had seen him completely break down last night and it was Kellin who Vic found himself wanting to hide from. But he stepped out of the bathroom with his thin body pressed against the wall to keep himself from falling down, and he looked at Kellin and realized what nice eyes he had.

They weren't nice, really. They were sad. They were dead eyes, eyes that had had something completely stolen from them but they were still so beautiful. The spark that had hijacked from those turquoise eyes wasn't gone, it wasn't gone but maybe it was close to leaving and maybe it was being taken farther and farther away but it was still there, it just needed something to draw it back. But Kellin didn't care about his eyes, nor did he care about what other people thought of his eyes. He did, in fact, care about his body and care about what other people thought of his body and his body in the sense that the part of his body that could house fat, which was not eyes. Kellin was fat. No, it wasn't an insult of any kind, but all too often Kellin had looked up the word in a thesaurus only to see that the word "gross" would come up as a synonym, which meant that he was gross. And no one wanted to be gross, but there wasn't really anything he could do about it. And there was nothing else to say about it, because he was gross and everyone else thought he was gross except for Vic Fuentes who was standing there with bruises and cuts displayed on his face in a fashion that was less than proud and while Vic could easily be standing there thinking to himself that he was lucky that he was nowhere near the weight of Kellin, he was instead looking at Kellin's absolutely beautiful eyes and wondering how someone could restore the life to them. The two stood in silence for quite some time before Vic decided to speak.

"What happened last night when I came in?" It was a valid question, but it made Kellin look uncertain and out of place, as though the room he was standing in wasn't even his own.

"You were all bruised up and... kind of bloody. Yeah. And you like fell down and then you were crying and-and-and, and I don't know and then you just, fell on the couch and basically... uh, like, cried. And fell asleep, then, I guess."

"I'm sorry." Vic said, wondering why he wasn't feeling as embarrassed as he expected himself to be.

"You never need to apologize for getting hurt," Kellin mumbled. It sort of frustrated Vic that everything Kellin said made him sound like he was apologizing for what he was saying as soon as he said it. He was the complete opposite, and more, of what confident was, and Vic felt bad for thinking that the least he could do was speak up.

"I'm more apologizing to you for putting you in a situation revolving around me when it didn't have to. And maybe I'm apologizing to myself for totally and completely embarrassing myself." Kellin opened and then closed his mouth, seeming to have to stop and consider what to say.

"It really wasn't that embarrassing." Vic shrugged, regretting that movement the moment he did it. He hurt, everything hurt. Nothing had changed from the previous night. Kellin noticed him wince, and held up a CVS bag.

"I got drugs. Not drugs, like, Advil drugs. Medicine drugs. I should just- not use that term. And band-aids. Band-aids are handy, you know. You can use them for anything. They're super helpful instead of tape, actually. Because they are so hard to get off of your skin, it takes even more to get them off a wall or something. Awesome. Totally great." Vic raised his eyebrows, feeling a faint, barely amused smile appear on his face as Kellin trailed off in his band-aids speech.

"Thanks," Vic said, taking the bag from Kellin and immediately swallowing a couple pills dry.

"Hey," he said, dropping the bag next to his bed. "I know it's none of my business but you've really gotta take your meds." Kellin promptly adopted a defensive disposition, a cold look showing on his face. It took about one second for him to go from his declaim about band-aids where he seemed to actually have a sort of personality to absolutely shut off, a cold stare on his face and the nervous little tics of his hands and knee stopping all too suddenly.

"Sorry," Vic said right away, knowing he shouldn't have said anything.

"No, it's just- it's fine. I know I should, but..." He trailed off, attempting to crack his knuckles over and over again, even after they had obviously lost the ability to crack for that moment. "Antidepressants really fuck with your head, and they-they-they're just not really helpful. There's no point in taking them if they have an adverse affect."

"Well then maybe you should go to a... psychiatrist? Dude, if they're prescribed then-" He was being nosy, he was being stupid, he should stop talking.

"Then it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter." Vic knew that the sentence after that probably consisted of something like "I don't matter," but Kellin stopped after that and looked at the ground.

"I'm just saying," Vic said, feeling absolutely terrible for sticking his face into Kellin's business. Kellin's phone buzzed and he nearly jumped out of his skin, fumbling the thing in his shaking hands. After taking a glance at the screen, he looked back at Vic.

"I, um, need to go." Vic nodded slowly, glad to have the opportunity to sleep some more and an opportunity to get away from the awkward situation that he himself had done such a magnificent job in creating. Kellin said his goodbyes and left again, leaving Vic to crash on his bed and pass out again.

::::::

When Vic woke up, Kellin wasn't there again, but he had stuck a note to the door explaining where he was this time. Vic still had a pounding headache, and assumed that Kellin had stuck the Advil in the bathroom. He walked in, prepared to take as many pills as needed to get rid of his headache, when he saw Kellin's pill bottles sitting on the counter.

They weren't totally full anymore. And Vic had felt bad about getting himself involved in Kellin's business, but it was clear that he wasn't dealing with anything on his own. If taking a few pills a day fixed that, then maybe Vic had done the right thing. For once.


	4. Skin and Bones

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> i LOVE THE WONDER YEARS SO MUCH WHO ARE THEY THEY'RE SUCH A GOOD BAND I'M . YELLING. nayways this chapter is named after skin and bones by marianas trench warning #1 the song might make you cry warning #2 there's stuff about eating disorders in here.

Kellin had been having a bad day. Deciding which days were bad and which were good had started getting harder and harder and it all sounded so fucking emo but he was more depressed than he could have thought and the only reason he got up in the mornings was because he never even slept. Which was fine, everything was fine, he was fine.

Except that he didn't sleep because he was scared of having nightmares and he was probably a hundred pounds heavier than he would like to be and he was terrified of actually being someone that wasn't a scared, sad, fat kid who had no defining personality traits and wasn't good at anything except eating too much and feeling sorry for himself. The worst thing was, that these days every single thing scared him. Food scared him. Scales scared him. Alcohol scared him. P.E class scared him. People locking doors while he was in the room scared him. Thinking certain people were attractive scared him. Perhaps the worst of all, taking his medication scared him.

Did he want to get better? Yes. Did he want to gain more weight or throw up or sleep too much or get really bad headaches? No. God, no, he just didn't want to feel sad anymore and god he just wanted to rip his skin off but he was too afraid of what was underneath to even try and he wanted so much yet he wasn't doing anything about it, so he just sat next to Ryan in their current events class that was honestly the biggest waste of time he had ever invested in, stared at the wall, and sunk deeper into the metaphorical pit of depression quicksand that no one was going to pull him out of anytime soon. In Lost in Space, someone always dragged someone else out of the space quicksand they always got caught in but Kellin didn't have anyone to help him, and he sort of wished that he did but he sort of didn't because he was awkward and bad and didn't know what he wanted he just specifically knew what he didn't want. 

The class was debating, talking about election and they lived in San Francisco so all anyone had to say was that they hated Donald Trump and Kellin just stared at the wall because no one was going to drag him into the conversation. 

Ryan hadn't washed her hair because it looked greasy and wasn't fluffy and had the classic dirty look going on. It was too long, as well, and she kept pushing it back from her face and around her head like she just couldn't get it to work and the view of her messing with it in Kellin's peripheral vision was really getting on his nerves so he just resulted to burying his head in his crossed arms on the table. And maybe it was the right thing to do, because he fell asleep.

Ryan woke him up when class was over, no one else had really noticed that he had passed out, and he followed her to lunch where he just really didn't want to go. If there was one thing that really scared him, it was eating in front of people. It brought on a terrible level of anxiety that completely overwhelmed him because he cared way too much about what everyone thought of him and cared too much about what he thought of himself and it was all too much. Earlier in the summer, when he had first learned that he was being kicked out of his house, he had first had a panic attack which had lead to a breakdown which had lead to a sleepless night in which he ate what he would just call "way too much food" which had lead to another breakdown which had lead to him really thinking the next day.

It had been a whole month since he had left the house, and the last time he had left it was when he was dragged to the hospital because he had been cutting again and needed stitches. Again. Everything had been sort of different and not real back then, like he hadn't been alive. Like he hadn't been inside his own head and hadn't been in control of anything and when he found the box cutter again the first instinct had been to just, use it. And there was no conscience to tell him not to so he just cut and it hurt and he had bled but he had hardly even noticed. Nothing had mattered anymore. So hearing that he was being sent to boarding school had been more than terrifying, and knowing that he was actually going into the next year of school was even more terrifying, if that was possible. He had missed a grand total of three months of school out of the year due to skipping class, spending too much time in the hospital, and overall just not being able to get himself out of bed.

The first thing that he had realized was that he needed to change everything. He needed to get thin, he needed to get rid of his scars, he needed to erase all of his memories, and he needed it all to happen now. And he had no idea how to get any of it done and none of it was going to happen and he was so full of self hatred and the complete inability to help himself in any way that he couldn't achieve anything that he wanted to and would instead just resort to breaking down.

The school day ended on an extremely low note as he had gym class which always seemed to consist of him getting yelled at for changing in the bathroom stalls and nearly passing out (seriously) because he was the literal and actual definition of out of shape. In the locker room, someone had asked what bra size he was and Jack had rolled his eyes. That had felt terrible and he had waited until everyone except Jack left before he changed. In a bathroom stall.

Before he went back to his room, he asked Jack if there was a 7-11 or anything nearby.

"Yeah," Jack said, giving Kellin that pity look. He seemed on the edge of saying something else, and hesitated for a moment. "Are you alright?" He finally asked, and Kellin almost laughed because that was always the easiest question to answer.

"I'm fine. Just kinda, kinda tired." Jack nodded and ran his fingers through his messy hair.

"Just, if you need anything. You can talk to me." It was awkward and Kellin felt like he was falling out of his body, not because it was awkward, just because his thoughts really were elsewhere and Jack was trying to be nice but he was sort of forcing himself to say it, well, he really wasn't and was actually an amazing and kind hearted person but Kellin wasn't good at judging character especially when he was feeling somewhat suicidal. So that was that.

"Thanks."

:::::::

Kellin had gone to 7-11. He had bought too much food that he knew he was going to eat all at once later on in the night, and had then got back to his room and done absolutely nothing because his level of productivity was at an all time low and he didn't know what to do with himself.

In the end, he found the book he was supposed to be reading for English, a miserable looking copy of Crime and Punishment, and spent the rest of the evening looking at the cover of it and trying not to make eye contact with Vic, who was actually there for once and looked like something you'd find lying motionless on the side of the highway. Bruises always got worse before they got better, and Vic's face was a prime example of how that worked out.

It was two in the morning when he finally took his 7-11 bags and made his way to the cafeteria with bleary eyes because he would do anything just to sleep, he supposed it was the medication, but he was at a mental state where nightmares would probably end up in him waking up screaming and crying out things that no one else wanted to hear. So instead of sleeping, he went and ate. A little naggy voice in his head that he wished would show up more often was off in the background preaching about how this was a bad, bad idea, but it was all too easy to ignore.

Ignoring it felt okay but actually starting to eat everything felt even better, and he rode out the good feeling for as long as he could. It didn't even feel as bad as it usually did at first, because nothing was bad about this time. He was sat in a table in the back of the empty cafeteria that was lit only by a tinny emergency light that never went off.

That was him, stuffing his fat fucking face with food at a time around two in the morning, knowing for a fact that no one would find him and knowing that after this he would really try to get his act together; he would stop binging and stop thinking about cutting his wrists because he had told himself that that wasn't serious. It hadn't really been all that serious- the most destructive thing that he had done was all the eating and basically ruining his body, not the cutting part. Well, his thighs did kind of look like they had been dragged through a field of barbed wire but that really wasn't he cared about, because he would tend to get more upset over stretch marks than scars. He had a lot of both, and he was trying to get to a state in his life where he stopped worrying about both of them. He wondered when that would happen. If that would ever happen.

Of course, he wasn't helping himself in the least by sitting there at that exact moment, eating enough food to last an average human who lived at a boarding school at least three days. But it was there and then it was disappearing, down his throat, into his stomach, to be worked out into calories and dispensed as fat around his body, to do him no good. Yet, it felt good. Good lasted for a bit, and then good reached sort of less good and then it turned to an uncomfortable feeling. Which quickly lead to something like pain because it wasn't really pain, not yet, at least, but it hurt a bit because if he wasn't binging he would have probably stopped because it was the sort of feeling that someone's body gave off saying- "I'm full, stop eating, I'm full, stop eating, I am full and please stop eating I am full." 

So Kellin stopped, but this was only for a break because there was still food to eat and he always made vows to finish everything he had bought for a binge. He drank some of his water and breathed, almost hearing the bad thoughts in the distance, marching his way. So then he declared that his break was over, and finished the binge. By the end, he felt like throwing up. He felt like he couldn't move, like he couldn't breathe, and he felt like fucking throwing up. Which he wasn't going to do, because his body had been trained not to throw up after taking in great intakes of food. He remembered the first time he had properly tried to binge, and had forced the food into himself while just thinking in his mind "this is going to fix things." Turned out, it hadn't, and he had ended up throwing up all of those calories that could have done him some good into the toilet.

It hadn't been a good idea to binge. And it was like the thoughts had shoved their way onto center stage in slow motion, kicking and punching at all of the good thoughts to get out of their path faster. Then came the breakdown. It always started with him looking at the wrappers and wreckage of everything he had eaten and feeling a terrible sense of guilt worm its way under his skin. He stared at everything on the table in front of him, his breath catching and a sort of choked up feeling working its way up into his throat. Then he couldn't breathe and all the major realization of what he had done really kicked in, and there went all of the positivity he had been desperately hanging onto for far too long. It was like his emotions and actions went from nothing to everything all at once, and then he was frantically clawing at the wrappers, adding calorie counts in his head and panicking, panicking because he didn't need to eat anymore he didn't need to do this anymore, he was safe. No, he might have been safe from the people back in Oregon who were out to hurt him, but he wasn't safe from himself. That thought crossed his mind and he dropped an empty package, his elbows hitting the table as he struggled to lean over his stomach to rest on something. And then the tears came. That was probably the worst part of everything, knowing that he was sitting alone at two in the morning in the dark cafeteria, bloated and huge, crying over food. That was always the worst part. Knowing.

:::::::

Jack Barakat was happy. It was late and he had had a good night, a night that involved cards and Honest Tea and Gee Way and Patrick Stump and pistachios, among other things. He had been dropped off by his two older friends who he had spent the evening with. Of course, Gee had let him off on the wrong side of campus because that's how she did things, and Jack slowly wandered back towards his room, taking his time because it was nice out and so was the moon and everything was just sort of pretty. Jack had ended up in the main building, taking a fascinating night tour of the school that he wasn't really aware that he was actually taking, and he had been about to leave until he had heard the crying. At least, he thought it was crying. It sounded like crying, like choked, quiet, crying. So Jack worried. Trying to trace where the sound was coming from, Jack ended up in the cafeteria. There was someone sitting at the back, but Jack couldn't make out who. He didn't think it was someone that he knew, but he felt like checking to make sure that they were okay regardless of if he knew them or not. That was always the most important thing, making sure that everyone was okay.

"Hey..." he said, his voice hanging in the air a bit as he spoke. His slowly made his way towards the back, to where this person was. They looked up, and Jack felt a horrible sinking feeling in his chest. It was Kellin. They made eye contact for about a split second before Kellin buried his head in his hands, his shoulders hunched up and his body curled over the table. Jack moved at a faster pace now, and adapted a very confused expression when he saw all of the wrappers.

Jack considered himself someone who didn't know what he was doing most of the time and wasn't the best at comforting people and, alright, there sat one of his new friends, crying and Jack couldn't just abandon him. So he cleaned; rid the table of all the wrappers and left Kellin with nothing but the water bottle and whatever small amount of dignity he had left, and then he sat. Kellin was wiping at his face in a somewhat distressing way, though he was still crying so it did nothing for him. His face was flushed with embarrassment, and his eyes were rimmed red with tears.

"Jack-I-" Kellin began, his voice breaking.

"No, just. Don't beat yourself up over this, okay?" Jack began, hoping that it had been a semi-decent start because the only really serious conversations he ever had were with Alex, Gee, and Ryan because they were basically his only friends and Jack didn't really know what to say, but there was no way he was going to leave Kellin there, upset and breaking down.

"What happened?" Jack resorted to asking, knowing that it was a bad question and he really should have picked something else to say.

"I thought- I- I thought- thought too much," Kellin stammered out, trying to get ahold of his emotions. After knowing Kellin for the grand total of a few days that Jack was too lazy to count out in his head, he had come to the realization that Kellin had a sort of stutter. It didn't only show up when he was upset, but sometimes it worked its way into ordinary conversations. Kellin still didn't seem to be working out his emotions, and was just miserably wiping at his eyes, obviously not getting anywhere with the dignity part of things he was trying to keep. Though Jack didn't want to embarrass him, Jack just wanted to help him out. And Jack didn't want to make things awkward, because he could just imagine the next day, Kellin avoiding his eyes and his words throughout the day; skipping lunch as to not have to deal with him. So Jack just said,

"Breathe." Kellin didn't reply, but made an obvious effort to do just that. His breath hitched and got caught up in all the tears. He leaned back, pulling his elbows off of the table, and properly sat up.

"Do you wanna... go? Walk? Get out of here?" Jack asked, almost panicky in his questioning.

"Yeah," Kellin said his voice too quiet and his movements jerky and weird; he was still debating if any of this was really happening because he was really a wreck. Jack met his disconcerted stare with a concerned one, and Kellin hesitated before turning his sad eyes to the ground and saying-

"I'm sorry."

"You've got nothing to apologize for," Jack replied, turning to slowly make his way out of the cafeteria with Kellin at his side. The latter was walking slowly, almost as if he didn't know how. Jack slowed his pace and pushed open the doors to lead them outside, and then Kellin really breathed. The chilly air outside seemed to calm him down, and he ran his hands back through his hair as he stopped on the grass.

"So-" Jack began, but Kellin cut him off.

"I don't want to talk about it. I binged, I cried, it's over." Kellin said, his voice still wobbly as if it were on the edge of breaking. Jack had started walking again, because he couldn't bear to sit or stand still for long periods of time, and Kellin followed him, though he didn't feel like walking at all.

They both breathed foggy patches of breath into the cold air, and silence surrounded them. Jack's hands were shoved into his pockets and he walked at a brisk pace, not knowing where he was going but wanting to go somewhere.

"Jack-" Kellin began, and this time he was interrupted. It was like they were at an American presidential debate, or something.

"I, just. You were so, so upset just a couple minutes ago and I mean, I don't want you to go through things... alone, and being upset alone because that's not good. And I don't want things to be awkward, either. And today, I don't know, listen- if you've got a problem with, fuck, I don't know but I don't want you to be dealing with all this shit alone." Jack had picked up a faster pace and Kellin was struggling to keep up, he was honestly struggling at everything these days.

"Slow down, stop, just stop. Stop, okay?" Jack stopped, realizing how fast he had been going and looked at Kellin with this terrible pitiful expression on his face. "I won't make things awkward. And-and you shouldn't worry about me, okay? I-I'm working on it. I just-I, uh, I just, eat too much." He broke eye contact with Jack and looked down again, realizing that the outline of his belly looked even more prominent through his shirt than it ever did. He felt sick. 

When Kellin looked at himself, he always felt sick. When he looked at himself, he weighed seven hundred pounds and was easily the most disgusting thing on planet earth. His scars were miles deep and just as long, deep trenches carved into his skin that would never ever leave because they were there to remind him that he deserved them. Every time he cried, the salt mixed with the scars that would never heal and it stung and it hurt and it never fucking ended. His stretch marks were neon signs advertising every single pound they had appeared to cause the skin to adapt to, any time he looked at himself all he saw were little numbers covering his skin he couldn't breathe he couldn't fix anything or change anything and maybe Jack wanted to try to help but he was someone who had no experience with whatever Kellin was going through, someone who thought rationally and wasn't depressed and wasn't so anxious about every single thing no, Jack could try to help but in the end the only one who could help Kellin was himself. Maybe Jack was trying to drag him out of the quicksand except the thing about quicksand was the more you struggled, the faster you sunk. And Kellin sure was struggling.

"Your arm." Jack said. So if the food wasn't the problem, then the next best thing had to be the scars all over Kellin's forearm.

"I don't do that anymore." Kellin's voice got stronger when he said this, the shaking stopping, bringing his eyes back to meet Jack's, this time, he wasn't lying or brushing it off. "I don't. And I won't. That was stupid." Jack nodded, all hesitant and weird. 

"I'm gonna fix things." Kellin almost sounded like he believed what he was saying.


	5. Nightmare

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> hello this chapter is a very nice filler. very nice. named after nightmare by the amity affliction. i love frank iero too also.

Gee Way liked being in charge. It felt nice to be in charge, to be in control over something for once. For most of her life, Gee had never been able to make her own decisions. Born in the wrong body to the wrong parents, Gee had been the wrong kid living the wrong life. Nothing had gone her way, or so she thought, right up until high school when she met Frank, and Frank had been the only thing that had made everything right. She knew what she was doing now, she supposed, because she had a job and a life and actually, if she stopped to think about it, she was living the happy kind of life she had always dreamed of.

The kind of life where she shared a small but cute apartment that was messy and smelled like a home smelled with Frank, the kind of life where she worked whatever jobs she wanted whenever she wanted and enjoyed them, the kind of life where she knew for sure that there were people who cared about her well-being, the kind of life where she could spend mornings drinking high quality tea at the record store she worked at and could spend evenings doing random modeling gigs her high quality friends got her into and could spend nights having high quality sex with her boyfriend and sometimes smoking only just quality weed late at night.

So life was good. Life was good and Gee was in love with someone and loved other people and things, which was always good. Love was a feeling that Gee would never get sick of, and she was glad that she got to feel it as often as she did.

For example: she loved Frank Iero. But she wasn't sure exactly how much she loved him when he was waking her up screaming over deals they had on merch for their store, though, but she was still certain that she loved him. His voice was squeaky in the mornings and it was even squeakier when there was a cough drop half down his throat and he was shrieking the "E" vowel like a deranged vulture.

"Geeeee!" He called from the other room, his fingers tapping out irregular rhythms on the keyboard. Gee rolled up in the blankets, turning herself into a sort of burrito.

"Gee!" He screamed, then resorting to coughing, probably choking on his cough drop.

"Hmm?" Gee moaned, curling the blankets around her as she sat up. Frank stepped into the room, his small frame standing in the doorway, his knee bouncing to a phantom beat in his head.

"I need my beauty sleep," complained Gee, pushing her hair back. Frank stared from the door, his hip cocked and his shirt riding up a little to show some of the ink that ran along his side. Gee loved Frank's tattoos. She was scared of needles and knew that she would never be able to get one, so Frank had done something that she characterized as one of the many things about him that he loved: he got every tattoo that she would have gotten if she could have.

Her favorite was the little pink one he got on the side of his forearm, a small symbol of the female gender sign. She remembered when he had showed it to her, when he had marched into their dorm and torn the tape off of the raw tattoo regardless of how much it would hurt to show her the little symbol, a tattoo she had been wanting to get for as long as she could remember.

Something was playing from the main part of the apartment, probably a record Frank had thrown on for his early-morning shop managing activities.

"Oh, it's your day!" He said sort of obliviously, a goofy grin appearing on his pretty face. Gee would have thrown her pillow at him if she had the energy, but instead returned the grin.

"It is my day. So leave me be." She said, not really wanting to be "left be," but Frank had got to go to his job soon anyways so then she could get ready.

"Are you stopping by the shop?" Frank asked, leaning his little body against the side of the door.

"It's Friday, isn't it?" That was enough of an answer for Frank, and a smile reappeared on his face. He didn't give up his casual stance in the doorway, and his lazy eyes seem to twinkle at Gee.

"Go," she said quietly, almost laughing. Having people around her for a while the day of shows stressed her out, which Frank obviously knew. He stepped forward slowly, and kissed Gee on the forehead.

"I'll see you later," he said, and made his way back into the main room. Gee heard the soft slide of the needle being raised off of the record, and the way Frank sighed when sliding the vinyl back into the case. Gee knew that music was probably the most important thing in the world to him, and something as little as having to turn off his music to turn back to the more important call of the rest of the world wasn't what he wanted to do. He was distracted that morning, somehow, and called out a faint little half hearted "bye!" before he left.

Gee always felt so calm in that little second after Frank left, because it was sort of a private sort of moment. She could drink her tea and put on her clothes and do her hair and makeup without having to rush or be distracted by Frank jumping around in the background, she could try on different things or take forty minute long showers and use up all the hot water without Frank giggling at her or complaining at her. Not that she didn't like hearing Frank, the main thing was that sometimes she just loved peace.

Which there wasn't anything wrong with.

Gee had a show tonight. In that sense, she would be modeling in a fashion show because of goddamned Josh. Josh Ramsay was a hopelessly gay Canadian man who had no idea what he was doing and had an absolutely terrible fashion sense that he creatively channeled into being an agent that no one wanted. Except Gee. Josh was kind, if too sensitive at times, and sort of knew what he was doing when it came to fashion shows and modeling. Well, he wasn't extremely attractive. He had a blue fringe that once was so long that it got tangled in his lip ring which then got torn out of his lip which then got infected. Not taking that experience as one to learn from, he had gotten rid of his lip ring and had then gotten a tongue piercing. Which was currently infected.

So Josh might have been a sort of dreadful mess, but he was the kind of dreadful mess that Gee liked spending time with and could sort of relate to at times. And that morning, she had to keep in mind what Josh would tell her to wear that day before the show that night. She probably wasn't wanted to wear any makeup or anything too fancy, because Josh probably had something else fancy and somewhat ridiculous in mind for whatever she would be wearing that night.

Gee spun around her room, finding refuge at her "makeup desk." She stared at herself in the mirror, and watched herself blink. It was almost mesmerizing, watching her eyes open and close right there in front of her face. Sometimes, Gee was shocked and sort of surprised to even be in her own body. And she was happy, for once, she was happy with her life and she was happy with herself but it wasn't like she felt a little insecure sometimes. Which was okay, because being sad and indulging in one's own sadness is alright sometimes, but not all the time, and it had been like that all the time for quite a while but things were better now and Gee had never been more glad.

Frank had always told her to just wait. He had always told her that things would get better and she just had to hold on and every time she had always asked when they would get better. And he would always say, "two months exactly." And in two months exactly, things had always improved. Sometimes just a little, and sometimes a whole lot. And that was exciting.

So sitting in front of the mirror, Gee wondered what would happen over the next two months to improve her life. It was always a weird thing to think about, especially because life seemed okay right then and she wondered what else could happen to change it.

Gee wondered a lot and thought about the past and the future a lot. Frank, on the other hand, lived in "the now," as he called it. So while Gee was always floating away in her mind to other places, Frank was there to keep her grounded and somewhat in the real world.

And it was perfect.

:::::::

"Eeeeuuugghhe." Josh said.

It was the kind of greeting that Gee was used to, and she watched with an uncertain face as she watched her friend's emotions change drastically. "I forgot about your hair," he added to whatever noise he had just made. Gee tried to nod except she didn't know what there was to forget about her hair. It was fine hair. "The color." Josh winced when he said that and Gee gave him an absolutely disgusted look.

"Well, I- well, I don't know, I had-maybe it was a dream- I had somehow convinced myself that it was a natural color." He finally finished.

"The color?" Gee demanded. Josh clicked his tongue with a disapproving look on his face. He was doing a magnificent job of ignoring Gee and glaring at her hair instead, so she just decided to wait until he made an executive decision about what to do.

"You'll have to dye extensions." Gee heaved a sigh. "I'm sorry! It's your hair!" He shrieked, waving his hands around. He started walking, and Gee followed after him. The whole backstage for the "venue" was pretty shitty looking, and was probably an insight to what the inside of Josh's mind looked like. The outside of his mind was just a Dunkin Donuts.

There were odd lighting wires hanging from the ceiling, cameras and lighting materials sitting in the middle of the stained grey floor, a shit ton of clothing racks everywhere, and a couch in the corner.

"What color are the extensions meant to be?" Asked Gee, rushing to keep up with the man who seemed to be trying to get away from her.

"Make them turn pink. From red." He instructed as though she was a sort of magician who could just wave a wand and make hair extensions change color. Gee frowned, and was quickly left in the nonexistent dust as Josh hurried off to do something else. Letting out a loud sigh, Gee turned to go find wherever the hair extensions were, and instead found another model. She was sitting on the couch, ripping up flower crowns. Her eyes widened as soon as she saw Gee; a sort of recognition on her face. Gee had never seen this girl before in her life, and took it that she was a new model because she was wearing a face full of makeup that had probably taken some time.

"You're Gee Way!" She announced in a loud voice. Gee smiled a bit.

"Yeah, I am. Who are you?" Gee had never felt... well, famous, in any way, but it was nice to be recognized for something. The question seemed to completely go over the girl's head, and she began to fall into a sort of rant.

"You-you were in that magazine! What was it called? Who cares! You got a whole interview, didn't you?" Gee couldn't help but roll her eyes at that, because the whole interview had been about how she was a transgender model and all they wanted to talk about was her transition and it wasn't meant to upset her and she still felt bad for having let it upset her but she didn't want to be known for being transgender. Because it was just like... that. She was transgender and she was a model but there was a lot more to her than that, just like Caitlyn Jenner was just "that trans lady," and really not known for much else these days. Yeah, Gee Way was a trans model but she also liked drawing comics, worked at a record shop, and had given up coffee because she had read something in a Stephen King book about how coffee helped in giving someone pancreatic cancer and had therefore decided to stop drinking it.

Not that Frank had stopped, because he still made it when he had time in the mornings and the scent filled the house and Gee made her rose tea instead but sometimes she just really wanted coffee. Whatever, it was fine. And this girl, with her pale skin and bright red lips and jet black hair was staring at Gee with a sort of awe on her face and something else glittering in her bright eyes, this girl admired her. And that was pretty fucking cool.

"I'm Lindsey," she breathed like it was a secret and something she wasn't allowed to tell anyone. It was a good name, Gee thought. "I'm Lindsey and you're Gee Way."

"I am." A smile. 

Throughout the day, while debating the guilt hanging over her about leaving Patrick all alone at work that day, Gee had just talked to Lindsey. Other models had come and gone, some stuck up, some shy, some just not having the time to talk to the two girls occupying the only good place to sit. Of course, Gee hadn't really meant to stain the leather on the couch with hair dye but it was absolutely perfectly fine, and Josh would never know. Never. Apparently, he was going for a stupid sort of theme that wasn't going to work out which had to deal with "nymphy things," in Lindsey's words, and Gee had never felt pain like she had before when she realized that the flower crowns being torn up in Lindsey's hands were just going to be scattered all over the stage, and that was their only use.

It had been quite traumatic. Flower crowns deserved as much respect as normal crowns.

Sometime maybe around four in the afternoon, Gee informed Josh that she was leaving and that she would be back with enough time to get ready for the show later. Lindsey had seemingly panicked, and had quickly followed Gee out of the building for fear of being left alone with the scary models. At some point, Lindsey found out that Gee was actually going to work, and ended up awkwardly mumbling something about a girlfriend and bidding Gee farewell, promising to see her later that night. 

So Gee went to work where Patrick Stump was no doubt waiting for her with a dark scowl on his face and thoughts of murder on his mind. She was not let down, because he was in the shop talking to two teenaged girls while holding up some old Queen vinyl with an angry and frustrated look on his face. After he had gotten through with explaining to them that yes, they did in fact need a record player to play a record on and they had left, he turned his glower towards Gee.

"I'm glad you decided to show up." At that, with almost perfect timing, Ryan Ross appeared from... somewhere, with the biggest smile on her face.

"Gee!" She shrieked. There were some people who were actually costumers in the shop, and some looked up with curious and somewhat judgemental looks on their faces. Ryan, on the other hand, looked oddly jubilant. 

Ryan Ross was one of Gee's best friends because she was just so great and cool and amazing and it didn't matter that she was a high schooler, she was still cool. Those days, she had seemed sort of.. well, dead. Not dead, but not energetic. Her smiles never really reached a state in where anyone believed them after all, and she always seemed sort of lethargic and un-inspired whenever she was around Gee. Ryan was a photographer and a runner but the latter always seemed to come first. Ryan had taken some quality shots a long time ago when Gee had been trying to get into modeling, and Josh had come along and marveled over the quality of Ryan's photos, and Gee as a person. Ryan had always enjoyed going to Gee's fashion shows and talking with Josh, meeting new people, and, of course, taking photos. It always made Gee smile, to see Ryan's camera stuck in front of her face, amongst all of the flashy lights and people and sound.

"-a show tonight?" Gee had been sort of lost in her thoughts, and blinked at Ryan and then realized that there was some kid around her age standing behind her, looking worried and honestly sort of miserable. The new kids. It was a Friday and school had just started, yes, Gee had almost forgotten that she would get to meet the new kids. 

Gee had sort of invested herself in the drama and lives, or the drama in the lives of the high school kids that hung out around her shop, like Ryan Ross. Every year some new kids showed up, and some stuck while some left. 

"Yeah I do, yeah-" Dismissive, but Gee loved meeting new people, especially when they were people with interesting lives that she would slowly but surely and completely not nosily (if that was a word) get sort of invested in. "Hi!" Ryan sighed a bit, but everyone knew that Gee would talk her ear off later on.

"Hi. I'm Kellin." He bit his lip when he spoke, and kept his eyes placed solidly on the floor. Obviously a very good conversationist. If that was even a word. 

"I'm Gee. Are you here for the year, then?" 

"Yeah." Not talkative at all, but Gee hadn't been expecting anything else. Ryan always adopted the weird kids as her friends.

"Anyone else here?" Gee asked, this question more directed at Ryan.

"Yeah, Jack and Tay, she's new too, they're here but Kellin is avoi-" 

"I am not." He finally looked up, and gave Ryan a very knowing look that caused her to screw up her face a bit. At least he knew how to speak.

"Kellin isn't avoiding Jack." Ryan announced.

"No, I'm not," Kellin finished, making very brief eye contact with Gee. He had pretty eyes, bright turquoise ones that made Gee smile a little.

"I like your eyes." He looked sort of shocked.

"What?"

"That was weird, sorry. Your eyes are pretty, I like them." Ryan snickered a bit, and Kellin looked surprised.

"They would make a good hair color. Y'know Alex, he should dye his hair the color of Kellin's eyes." Ryan nodded while Kellin just looked confused and smiled a tiny little bit.

"What if our eye color matched our hair color?" Gee asked, almost excited about it before realizing that only people with blue or green eyes would be in luck.

"The other way around would be better." Kellin said, staring at the ground again. That was true, because Gee would have bright red eyes. 

"I'd look like the fucking devil," she laughed, making a face at Ryan. The words weren't spoken but Gee swore she could hear Patrick repeat her statement but only altered a little bit from behind her.


	6. Headspace

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> hey there i hate this stupid damn website wattpad is so much better but here! read my story! this chapter is named after headspace by the wombats god damn what a band

Ryan's alarm clock went off at five thirty every single morning without fail. And it wasn't the perfect setup because her roommate, a girl named Lynn, thrived off of sleep and would throw a fit if she didn't get at least nine hours of sleep. Yet it wasn't surprising that Ryan's alarm didn't wake Lynn up because once she fell asleep, it was significantly harder to wake her up. Ryan liked to think that she was like a bear hibernating when she fell asleep. Lynn never denied it. So then maybe it was the perfect setup and Ryan just didn't know what she was talking about, but never really got enough sleep and it was probably all because of Gee Way and perhaps it was because of her persistent work ethic but she was alive and healthy enough so sleep could come second, or even third, to other parts of her life.

Ryan had spent the previous night talking to Gee about life while drinking from her friend's abundant supply of Honest Tea. Gee and Frank were big Honest Tea fans. There was a feud going on at Under the Sun, the record store that they worked at, about which was better: Honest Tea or Arizona Tea. Pete and Patrick were on team Arizona while Gee and Frank were wholehearted defenders of Honest Tea. Ryan liked Honest Tea but didn't share her opinion due to a fear of what Pete would say to her if she announced it. Maybe it was also because she had never seen Patrick angry before and didn't want to just because of her opinions on certain brands of iced tea. 

Even though she had stayed up late, she didn't care that she was woken up by the bothersome sound of her alarm. The blaring of her phone actually relieved her, because every morning was a relief, a fresh start. 

She got to run.

And running was what kept her somewhat same, she loved every part of it and wouldn't give it up for anything. She had always liked it, earlier on. It had all started with Girls on the Run in 6th grade, in which she had run a 5k and realized that she absolutely loved the feel of running, the sore feeling in her muscles, the happiness she got from it.

But things had changed for the worse and it was only her freshman year of high school that she had gotten back into it. It had started with a three mile run every few weekends. The first few times, she had thrown up. 

Throwing up was now only a problem if she ate before running and now autopilot was kicking in because she knew exactly what to do without having to stop for one second to consider what to do. The routine in the morning was familiar and comforting, and sometimes she wondered what life would be like if everything had to change again.

So Ryan changed her clothes, filled up a water bottle, left her room, and walked down to the track while thinking about what Brendon was doing right at that exact moment. She assumed he would be asleep, and smiled when she thought of his stupid self asleep. He was an ugly sleeper in an extremely cute way. Brendon's dark brown hair would always end up pressed against a pillow or the side of his bed, looking spiky and unbalanced. Sometimes he would have his mouth open, leading to drool ending up on whatever surface his face was squished on. Ryan appreciated Brendon much more than she should have, because she wasn't always repaid with the same feelings that she sent out.

Ryan and Brendon were best friends, but nothing more than that. Ryan wasn't really exactly sure if she even wanted to be any more than that, but had a sinking feeling that she did and it was only a sinking feeling because she knew that he would never feel the same way about her.

That lonely, almost hollow feeling inside was drowned out by the beating of her feet against the steady track, and she began to concentrate more on her breathing than of Brendon Urie's entire existence. Ryan wished she had music. It was much easier to run when she didn't have to hear her own breathing as she circled the track, and whenever the pain in her shoulder came up, she could just pick apart the pieces of whatever music was playing in her head, usually The Black Keys or Young the Giant. Today, her phone was sitting on her dresser at home, and she was getting too worked up over the fact that she could hear her own breath and sped up and slowed down more than she would like.

This seemed to fuck up her running rhythm, and she soon came to realize that she wasn't going to get much done that morning. She went around the track as many times as she could, but found herself distracted by trivial things that never seemed to break through her "running bubble of zen and sweat." Ryan didn't know how long she had been running for, but knew that it wasn't long enough. She also knew that she wasn't going to be able to run properly, and stopped, gasping for breath. As she often did after running for a while, she sank to the tarmac of the track, not caring about how hot it was. She bent her knees in front of her, squinting in the hot sun and falling back on the hot track. Her back burned, but she really didn't take any notice of it. It was almost scary in a way, that she felt like she could drift off right there and then if she really wanted to. The track was a comfortable place to fall asleep.

But she didn't.

Instead of concentrating on her heartbeat, which was getting more and more regular and less and less giving her the sensation that it was coming up on beating out of her chest, she concentrated on the footsteps that were becoming louder and louder. Ryan knew that they were Brendon's, because there was really no one else who knew that she would be down there absolutely not working her ass off around six in the morning.

"Ryyaann," she heard him call, stepping closer to her. He sat down and crossed his legs. "Sit up," he said gently. She got up, pushing her sweaty hair back behind her ears. Brendon was smiling, as he always seemed to be. Brendon was like the sun. After every night, good or bad, he was always, always there to make things seem slightly better. He showed that there was always another chance, there was always a new day waiting. He was warm and only sometimes made one uncomfortable. He was happy, he was bright, he was always somewhere, even if you couldn't be with him all the time. God, Ryan loved Brendon. 

"How many laps?" He asked her, completely taking note of her lack of earbuds and musical device. When there was no music to listen to, Ryan focused by counting laps as some way to manage to keep running.

"Lost track." Brendon raised an eyebrow, knowing that it wasn't a common occurrence to "lose track."

"What's up?" He asked, pushing his hair back in the same way that Ryan did except that his hair wasn't nearly as long as hers. Lots of stuff was up, but Ryan didn't feel the need to discuss it.

"Nothing." She replied, but nothing didn't really mean nothing because she had started stressing about things that she had never really stressed about before, like how she began to spend too long staring at herself in the mirror every morning. Or how her stares had turned into glares or how she had tried layering sports bras or how she had never felt so confused about anything before. It wasn't vain to think that she was a pretty intelligent person because, well, she was. But these feelings weren't ones she wanted in her life because if something she was feeling confused her, then it probably wasn't anything good, and would probably end up with Gee being the only one who knew what to do about it.

"So I got Henna!" Brendon said, giving her another one of his bright smiles. Brendon was an artist, but instead of using proper canvases, he used humans as canvases, and did really, really cool makeup and art. Ryan was his main subject, though he used to sometimes use Vic and still sometimes used Jenna McDougall, the extremely hyper Australian chick who was sort of extremely gay and was only somewhat hard to be around.

Whenever Brendon got his hands on new kinds of paint or some Henna, he would usually have Ryan come over and they would sit on the floor in his room, take their turns choosing vinyls to play on Brendon's record player, and singing along while Brendon drew designs up and down Ryan's arms. Brendon got up, outstretching his hand to Ryan. She took it, pulling herself up. Hand in hand, they made their way up the hill leading down to the track, their minds focused on different things that both somehow could trace back to each other.

::::::

Ryan fell asleep. Brendon had been decorating her tan arms with Henna, and hadn't noticed her body fall slack and her head tilt back against the wall. She was an ugly sleeper in an extremely cute way. Her mouth was partly open, and she was even snoring a little bit. Her hair was damp with dried sweat and it stuck to the sides of her face, with little tendrils sticking out to make her hair look fluffy and soft. Brendon had finished with his Henna, and wanted to leave it on for quite a while before washing it off to make sure it lasted a while. Brendon always liked to have his artwork publicly displayed on people's skin so anytime anyone saw the designs they would always end up asking about who did it and the answer was always Brendon so in the end he just ended up with a lot of popularity. 

All in all, he was a popular guy because he had a sense of humor and good hair, but he was one of the good popular people. And he might have sort of been friends with everyone, but he kept his close friends close and was incredibly loyal. Personality traits that he had were somewhat similar to those of a generic Golden Retriever. 

And he wanted to crush Ryan at Mario Cart.

Brendon's roommate, Spencer, had an old Wii that they would sometimes hook up to their extremely faulty old TV and then they would kill each other. Not literally, of course. Whenever the Wii broke out, everyone went batshit crazy and chaos always ensued. So Brendon woke Ryan up, knowing that she could sleep whenever she wanted to and didn't have to pass out right at that exact moment. After a couple pokes and a few more not very quiet whispers of her name, Ryan woke up.

"Did I- wait- did I fall asleep?" She asked sort of unconsciously, pulling strands of hair out of her mouth. Brendon smiled without realizing it. He was always happy when Ryan was with him, and sometimes he would get to a point of overthinking where he got so terrified about losing Ryan that he had to call her and make sure that they would still be friends forever and would never leave each other. And when Ryan was woken up by those terrified two a.m calls, she would always yawn out the words "I love you," by the end of the call, reassuring Brendon that he was safe to sleep now and when he woke up Ryan would still be there.

"Want to get your ass kicked at Mario Cart and then go wash off the Henna?" Brendon asked, already looking for the Wii remotes.

"Of course I want to kick your ass at Mario Cart and go wash off the Henna," Ryan laughed, sitting up and re-tying the messy ponytail that hung down around her shoulders. Ryan caught the remote that Brendon threw, neither of them caring about the dried Henna getting smudged on her hands. Ryan had just woken up so Brendon was much faster at getting to be Player 1 and was much faster at picking the tracks he wanted. Ryan groaned in disbelief, because she sucked at Wario's Gold Mine, but Brendon seemed to have some odd knack for it. They chose their characters and then they were sucked out of the real world and were completely shoved into Mario Cart world, in which Brendon was ultimately going to totally kick Ryan's ass. Ryan didn't know how she did it, but she was willing the TV to do one of it's random shut offs, and that happened exactly halfway through their second lap through Coconut Mall. Brendon let out a loud exclamation, angrily turning to Ryan.

"Seriously?" Ryan leaned back, laughing. Brendon inched closer to her and before she knew it she was totally being attacked, with tickling. This caused ultimate pain to Ryan, and the frustration she always felt because Brendon wasn't ticklish, but she was too busy trying not to hit her head on the edge of the bed from laughing so hard. Brendon finally let up after about a minute of "Torture the Ryan Ross" and sat back, looking pleased. Ryan was curled up with her body halfway off of the bed and halfway on the floor, crying with laughter.

"Never," she wheezed, "again." She gave up trying to stay on the bed and completely collapsed onto the floor with an "umph." Her face was pink with laughter, and her eyes were bright and happy. When Ryan was happy, Brendon was happy. The two seemed to share emotions like that. If Ryan was sad, Brendon was sad, and if Ryan was excited, stressed, worried, or elated, so was Brendon. And vice versa. Hard times were hard for both of them and happy times were oh, so happy for both of them. It hadn't always been that way before they had moved, though, and too many times Ryan had shown up in tears at Brendon's house expecting some form of comfort and not getting what she wanted.

Neither of them had been in good states of mind. Ryan had spent all her time trying her best to be happy and failing, while Brendon had spent all of his time trying to find a way to fix things for her. Not that he had failed. And one day he had had his own breakdown because he hadn't thought about himself in so long, he hadn't showered, he hadn't eaten, he hadn't slept, he was living his life to make sure that Ryan's life was perfect. But he wasn't succeeding. One week of him trying to get back into his own life had been a week too much, but they had moved and things had cleaned up, yet neither of them would forget how Brendon's love had been unfailing, how he had given up his own well-being for Ryan's.

She was so grateful.

Brendon pulled Ryan up off of the floor with Ryan's smile blooming on his face. Ryan brushed herself off, re-straightening her clothing and glancing back up at Brendon.

"You better not put it on the highest setting," Ryan said with a faux angry look on her face that was incredibly cute. Ryan was talking about the hose that Brendon was going to use to wash the Henna off of her arms. The hose was cold, but that was okay until Brendon always turned the thing on full blast and attempted to kill her. Brendon gave Ryan a sly smile that obviously meant that he was going to turn the hose on full blast and attempt to kill her. It was warm outside, a nice transition day from the end of summer into the fall. The pair walked outside of the building that housed Brendon's room, making their way around to the back of the building where the hose resided.

There was a path that snaked around the back of the buildings with all the rooms in them, and Brendon glanced along the path to check that no one was coming. He then grabbed the hose with surprising speed and fucking opened fire on Ryan, who squealed and threw her arms up, efficiently getting rid of the Henna.

"Oh my fuck-" she was cut off by the stream of water hitting her exceptionally hard exactly square in the face. She dropped to the ground, twisting around to have the freezing water hit her back. Even though it was cold and it even hurt, Ryan still found herself laughing. Trying to throw off Brendon, she turned around and did an incredibly advanced belly slide along the muddy, grassy ground which lead her to end up at Brendon's feet. Brendon looked down at his friend, who gave him a wicked grin.

That was the last thing he saw before he was blasted with the water, left a spitting, soaking mess, crying out for mercy. After battering Brendon for a bit, Ryan turned the water to a different setting and spun towards the quickly setting sun with the hose on a mist setting. Ryan immediately smiled when a rainbow showed up, and called a distraught Brendon over to look at it.

"That's so gay," he yelled in a whiney voice, earning a shove in the shoulder from Ryan.

"You're so gay," Ryan said in the same high pitched voice. Brendon stuck his tongue out at her, and Ryan turned the hose back on him, seemingly forgetting it was on a mist setting, Brendon tried a hair flip with his soaking hair, ending up shaking his head like a wet dog and splattering Ryan with the water. She laughed out loud, grabbing Brendon's arm as he stumbled with dizziness. Instead of standing straight up, he fell down onto the slimy ground.

"Whoa. The world is spinning." Ryan didn't know what made her find that so funny, but she was laughing up a storm, trying to make funny faces at Brendon's disoriented form. From his vantage point on the ground Brendon just saw a cloud of mist, the sunshine, and a burning ball of gas that was burning bright from millions of miles away.


	7. Crickets Throw Their Voice

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> named after crickets throw their voice by basement. i'm giving up on summaries i just want this up tonight i'm TIRED

Jenna McDougall was the kind of person who always had too many emails stacked up in her inbox that warned her about every single band coming to or near the Bay Area. And though she never deleted them even though no she did not want to see Earth, Wind, and Fire, she supposed that they were still helpful because she had a job because of the emails and went to lots and lots of concerts. 

Well, it wasn't uncommon to have a job. Jenna just was very diligent about hers because without the job she wouldn't have any money for concert tickets and concert tickets were the things that really mattered in life. Jenna valued her job working at Trader Joe's very highly, and had also valued the two tickets she had just bought to a Basement show. She always bought two because going to concerts alone was shit, but her designated concert friend had left so now she would have to find someone else.

Jenna's first concert had been a The Amity Affliction concert. She had been ten years old, and had been brought with her older sister and her friends. None of them really even liked the band that they were seeing, but the three older girls that had dragged Jenna along with them were desperate to see anyone live. Jenna's parents had gone on a weekend trip and had trusted Jenna's older sister, Andrea, to babysit her little sister. However, that hadn't happened. The three girls, including the ten year old Jenna, had ended up at a metal show that Jenna's parents would definitely not consider safe.

The best concert she had been to was Green Day, which she had gone to with her designated concert friend, Hayley. Hayley had been Jenna's roommate all through high school up until the previous May where she had announced that she was leaving. It had all happened too fast, but now the memory of Hayley was ruined, and Jenna was just waiting to see if Tay Jardine would soon be another memory.

Jenna liked Tay. A lot. It was sort of sad, seeing as they lived together and never had conversations that added anything of substance to either of their lives, and Jenna found herself wishing almost all the time that friendships didn't need to start out with any kind of awkwardness; that people could just instantly become friends.

Then there was the problem that Tay Jardine was also kind of hot and had a really fucking sexy voice and Jenna was having a little trouble living with someone she found so damn hot, but she told herself that she would have to deal with it, ultimately assumed Tay was straight, and continued on with her daily life. Except Tay was not straight, which was not something that Jenna was aware of. 

Jenna was bisexual and not proud of it at all. When people asked, she told them she was straight not just because it was easier, there was also the reason that she had only dated boys but still found some girls really incredibly sexy, and did not consider that a thing that straight girls felt. She had sort of shagged a girl, but she wasn't exactly sure exactly what that had been, but that was beside the point, the social justice warriors of the LGBT+ community had decided that the "B" meant nothing and that if you were a bisexual female and had a preference for girls then you were a lesbian, and if you and had a preference for guys then you were straight. 

Jenna was pulled out of her thoughts when she heard someone yelling her name. She was simply walking home from class, distracted and possibly aimlessly wandering around campus looking for nothing and no one in particular, just trying to figure out how she was going to ask Tay to go to the show with her without it coming across like she was asking her on a date. Jenna wasn't thinking straight, and knew that Tay wouldn't think of it like a date, but Jenna was just trying to make sure that she definitely wouldn't think it was a date because Jenna was in no place to be asking out hot girls on dates.

The voice that made Jenna jump and finally realize where she was was hoarse and kind of scratchy and belonged to the one and only Tay Jardine. Jenna spun around to see her friend walking towards her, followed lethargically by the one and only Ryan Ross. Ryan gave a little wave, hanging back a bit.

"Sorry, I just screamed your name out of nowhere. That's fun. Um- so! Lynn told Ryan to tell me that you had something really important to ask me?" Tay posed it like a question when it was really a statement, and Jenna's eyes widened at the prospect of having to ask Tay on a date right there and then, in front of Ryan. Jenna then reminded herself that it was not a date, and she didn't have to worry about asking anyone on a date if she wasn't asking anyone on a date.

Lynn Gunn was weird. She was one of those people who wore the same all-black outfit all the time and then switched it every week, or two, depending on what kind of mood she was in. Lynn slept a lot, complained a lot, and really didn't like people who didn't share the same views as her. She was blunt and straightforward, rarely showed emotion, always did what she thought was best. So when Jenna confessed to her that she really wanted to ask Tay to a concert but didn't know how, Lynn had obviously gone and told her roommate to go and tell Tay, who was close friends with Ryan.

So Jenna gave Tay a smile that resembled a grimace and defended herself against whatever in the world she was being attacked with.

"It really isn't that important. I was just wondering if, this weekend, you'd like to go to a concert with me." Tay's face brightened, and she gave Jenna a smile that made Jenna question why she was even alive anymore.

"Of course! Yeah, cool!" Behind them, Ryan let out a cough, sort of followed by and mixed with an "oh, shit!"

"I have got to go," Ryan said quickly, staring at her phone with an expression of panic frozen on her face. She looked up at Tay for a split second, the panic still frozen in her eyes. "Bye!" Without waiting for an answer from either of them, she took off, sprinting back down the path she had come down at full speeds.

"She's got great legs..." mumbled Jenna, watching Ryan run down the path. It was the kind of fast running around twisty paces at high speeds that Jenna loved for some reason, when said runner flings their arms out when they turn corners and differentiates between their tiptoes and heels and when their hair flies out and oh god Jenna loved the oddest things. Tay had heard Jenna's covert comment, and giggled.

"Yeah. Well, she's a runner, what do you expect?" They talked about running and swimming pools on the way back to their room, and their talk turned into water parks and tampons when they finally reached their residence.

"Wow, I didn't even ask!" Tay exclaimed, laughing at herself. "Who are we seeing this weekend?" Jenna balked, confused.

"Seeing...?"

"Y'know. The concert." Jenna jumped, clapping her hands.

"Right! Right, right right. Basement. They're a little pop punk band. I think you'll like them." Tay smiled at her, her brown eyes glittering. Jenna wondered what Tay's eyes would smell like if eyes had proper scents. Maybe like chocolate and campfires and the good smell of dogs that isn't all fishy and gross and breath-y.

"Cool. I'll use the two days I have to listen to all of their songs."

"They don't have too many... do they? I can't remember. They might." Jenna said, probably embarrassing herself and totally feeling like a middle schooler making a fool of themself in front of their crush but oh my god what if eye colors had smells? Jenna thought this over while until she realized that Tay was talking to her again, and snapped out of her daze.

"Sorry, what?"

"We're going on Saturday, right?" Jenna took a second to think of where they were going on Saturday, and then realized that duh it was the concert on Saturday.

"Yup. Saturday."

"Oh. Would it be possible to go to like.... a store or something before because my shoes are falling apart and today was basically their last good day because..." Tay trailed off and Jenna stared at her shoes, breaking into a laugh that she quickly stifled.

"'Course we can. There's this big ass mall we can go to that's got like a bajillion Cinnabons and the whole places smells like heaven."

"Sweet. Thanks," Tay said, smiling. She smiled a lot, which made Jenna really happy because she loved smiles and people who smiled a lot and she just loved seeing other people happy. She got distracted by everything, and took a moment to gather herself and remember that she had to go tell Vic about what had happened.

"Well, I need go to, um, gossip. Not about you. Nice. I'll be back!" Cursing herself, Jenna slipped out the door too quick for Tay to do anything, and then she nearly collapsed in the hallway. Jenna McDougall had asked a girl out on a date that wasn't actually a date, and she would get to hang out with her all. day. long.

Vic was going to love this.

:::::::

Jenna had made a new friend, sort of, well, she considered him her friend because she liked to consider people her friends and he was sort of unenthusiastic so maybe he didn't consider her a friend, but it was all perfectly okay. He was Vic's roommate and his name was Kellin and he was cool enough but he wasn't happy and it upset Jenna but she tried not to think about that as she paced around Vic and Kellin's room while she talked and talked and talked about Tay and then she stopped and made both of them promise that they wouldn't tell Lynn or Ryan or Tay or anyone about her crush and they agreed so then Jenna went back to her pacing.

It was obvious that neither Kellin or Vic cared too much about what Jenna was saying, as they were both partaking in different activities while nodding and "mhm"ing at the right times to get Jenna to think that they were paying attention.

Kellin was ripping pieces of paper out of a beat up notebook and making little designs on his bed with the shreds.

Vic was going over his notes from some class and attempting to complete his homework, although it was obvious that he was clueless and had no idea what he was doing.

Jenna knew that she was supposed to be doing things like ripping paper apart or doing homework, but she needed love advice. And she was going to get this advice whether the people meant to give it to her liked it or not.

Vic had started giving her situations and asked her what to do in them, and Jenna was trying to answer them with as much thought as possible but she really didn't want to mess up her date. Which wasn't a date.

Jenna hadn't realized how long she had been there, walking around and expressing all of her inner fears to the two only fairly apathetic people who were keeping her company. Or maybe they were keeping her company. So she asked Vic whether she was keeping them company or whether they were keeping her company, and Vic told her that they were keeping each other company and that she should stop worrying. Jenna then asked Vic what he thought Kellin's eyes would smell like, and then Vic asked her if she was okay. Jenna replied that she was okay, just really hungry. So they got a vegan pizza because Jenna was vegan and she had no idea what vegan pizza was actually made out of, but it tasted okay and neither Kellin or Vic had anything bad to say about it so she decided that it was fine. At least they didn't call her a hippie, which is what Brendon did any time she was near him or Ryan because her and Ryan together were the complete definition of hippies and then Brendon had the weed so it was all a bit of a mess but Jenna didn't like Brendon because he was an ass and didn't take anything seriously. In a way, he reminded her of herself.

As they sat on the gross carpeted floor and ate their pizza, Jenna debated asking whether she could sleep there for the next two nights because she wanted to spend as little time with Tay as possible because she didn't want to ruin what they had, and what they had really wasn't much of anything but it didn't matter because they were going on a date that wasn't a date. So Jenna asked if she could stay over and Vic said no, but he said it kindly because he was Vic.

Jenna soon realized that she had promised Tay that she would be back soon and it had been hours so she decided to thank Kellin and Vic for their advice and depart. So Vic walked her back to her room like a true gentleman and told her that she would be fine. He then hesitated for a second and unknowingly raised his hand to touch the bruise around his eye.

Jenna never asked. She knew and she saw and Vic was one of her closest friends and it was obvious that things between him and Jaime weren't perfect but she had never considered it her business. Maybe she was a bad friend for it but it was obvious that she wasn't good at confrontations of any kind and didn't want to interrogate Vic about how beat up and tired he looked all the time.

She hoped that both of them would be fine.

:::::::

It was Saturday morning and Jenna was locked in the bathroom trying to brush her teeth, towel dry her hair, and text Vic all at the same time. It wasn't working. Her phone was covered in water and toothpaste spit, the foamy kind that got all over the sink and made Jenna wonder why no one had invented a sink cleaning machine yet. So Vic told her that he had to go and she dropped the towel, dripping toothpaste down onto her bra and hissing in frustration. She spat her toothbrush into the sink and threw her old Snow Patrol shirt that she really liked on with her best flannel over it and hoped that smelling like toothpaste was a good thing and rinsed out her mouth and accepted Vic's good luck wishes and took a look at herself in the mirror and realized that she had forgotten to brush her hair. So she ran her weird, pink gel-handled hairbrush through her hair and threw it back on the sink which resulted in a loud smash which then made her realize that she should open the door to let Tay know she was okay, so she checked her appearance one more time before opening the door. Tay was sitting on the floor, picking at her shoes. The sole on the left shoe was totally falling off, and the rest of it was worn and hole-y and incredibly painful looking.

"Ready to go?" She asked Jenna, smiling at her. Tay smiled so much that Jenna really couldn't help but be super gay for her, and she returned her smile in the full, only to dim it because the light outside didn't look as bright as it could be.

"It isn't raining, is it?" If it rained, Jenna's day would be completely ruined. So when Tay answered with a "no, I don't think so," Jenna rushed to the window and watched the light grey skies for a matter of time before replying,

"Good. I don't like the rain." It was more than a dislike, she thought, she didn't know why but rain made her anxious and feeling anxious wasn't a fun feeling and the thought of all that water pouring down out of the sky and driving people inside and then sometimes it would start thundering and lightninging (a word that wasn't a word that Jenna used whenever she could) and everything would get terrifying and bad. However, Jenna felt like the threat of scary rain would feel much less intimidating if she could just look over and see Tay's smile, which would probably drive away all of the clouds and bring out the sun because her smile was basically equal to sunshine and dear god Jenna was so gay for her. She followed Tay out of the door, forgetting to lock it and only remembering to when Tay asked if she had her key. They walked to the bus stop in a comfortable, excited silence. Jenna managed to break the silence with an awkward question-

"What kind of shoes do you want?" Tay's answer came back right away, she had obviously been thinking this over.

"Vans. I'm always on the Vans side, in the Converse versus Vans thing. Vans are always better." Jenna wasn't really aware of how intense the Converse versus Vans thing was and why Tay brought it up so quickly, but Jenna knew that most of her friends would be on the Converse side. Which was totally not her side.

"Yes! Vans are obviously superior, obviously. Duh." Tay laughed and made Jenna totally want to die. Before she could, the bus pulled up to the stop and Tay and Jenna boarded it, easily finding empty seats. Jenna had always liked public buses, and found the seats oddly aesthetically pleasing. The erratic tapping of Tay's foot distracted Jenna from her admiration of the bus.

"What are you listening to?" She asked Tay, mentally slamming her head into a metal pole. "I mean, like, in your head?" Jenna giggled at the end of her sentence, and full on grinned when she saw Tay's smile.

"Crickets Throw Their Voice."

:::::::

"Try this on!" Jenna was in a changing room at Wet Seal, and gasped when she heard close Tay's voice was to her, especially when she was half dressed. Three clothing items and a pair of shoes were slid under the door, and Jenna picked them up off of the dirty floor with an amazed grin on her face. Tay had found her a mini denim vest that looked like something Matty Mullins would have worn as a five year old. There was also a pair of black-and-white horizontally striped shorts that were cut at an awkward length and were tight at the waist but puffed out around the thighs. The shoes were ridiculously high heeled sandals, done in a horrible off-white color that matched a tattered crop top with an awfully swooping neckline. Tay's loud snickering from outside of the room fueled Jenna's need to try on the outfit, so she did.

As soon as Jenna saw herself in the mirror, she burst out laughing. Tay knocked on the dressing room door, a chorus of repeated "let me see!" echoing from outside. Jenna threw open the door, hitting Tay square in the chest. Tay sunk down to the floor, already laughing but then she actually saw Jenna and started actually screaming with laughter. Crumpling to the floor of the hallway, she grabbed at the wall to try to hold herself up but that didn't work so instead she just melted into a laughing pile of beauty on the floor while Jenna leaned against the doorframe, laughing only slightly less hard because she hadn't been hit in the chest by the door.

"Excuse me, ladies?" Jenna, who had been expecting this to happen sometime, stopped laughing almost immediately when an angry looking Wet Seal worker rounded the corner. "I'm afraid we're going to have to ask you to leave." Tay, who was a giggling heap on the floor, didn't ask why they were being evicted, just accepted Jenna's help to get back to her feet, and told her friend that she'd wait outside the store while she changed back.

The two met again outside of the shop, where Jenna suggested that they head over to the venue where they would be spending the rest of their day. Once they got back outside, with Tay's new shoes on her feet and her old ones shoved into Jenna's bag, Jenna realized that it wasn't going to rain. No, not at all.

Since it was most definitely not going to rain, the pair spent the rest of their day eating their Cinnabons and laughing in the hot sun outside of a tiny little venue somewhere in San Francisco. When 7:00 rolled around, they entered the shitty little club that smelled like weed and gasoline to find that most things had actually been set up and the show started sometime after that but neither of them knew when because they weren't checking the time because they were excited and it was a good fucking night.

It mainly consisted of being thrown around a lot, Jenna had ended up being shoved onto the stage but she had jumped right off into the crowd and had actually been carried which had been a complete experience, lyrics being shouted at the stage so loudly that by the end everyone sounded like squeaky rats except for the singer, being thrown around some more, and really just enjoying themselves. At the end of the night, Jenna and Tay ended up outside of the venue, still laughing. It was as though their happiness was never going to end, and Jenna hoped to god that it never did because everything felt so right. They were walking back to somewhere, knowing that they would end up at home somehow, and they were walking close together and Tay smelled like sweat and cinnamon and then somehow her hand ended up tangled with Jenna's and they walked the rest of the way holding hands and still, always, laughing.


	8. Nutshell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> named after nushell by alice in chains. psa the smashing pumpkins are a fuckin fantastic band you should listen to them.

Ryan was in P.E class, where everyone was supposed to run laps for all of class due to their teacher being behind on some of the work he had to get done, which prompted his lazy self to make his students run around the gym for the entire block. It was true physical education.

Running wasn't something Ryan had trouble with, and anyone who had walked by the track on any given morning would have realized that too; running was the one thing that Ryan could do easily, without any concentration. And yet there she was, already out of breath and flustered from four laps around the gym. She knew what was wrong and was going to do absolutely nothing about it because there was nothing to do about it, but she knew that the coach would shout at her for walking, he was doing it to everyone, and she didn't want that either because the faster she ran the more everything hurt, god, it was such a terrible mess.

Debating what to do in her head, Ryan knew the easy way out of the situation, but she wasn't going to take it. She never would. Instead, she started running again, going at a slow pace but it hurt and she knew that it wasn't right but, again, there was nothing she could do about it except give up. The coach kept looking up from time to time to shout at certain people to speed up and to stop talking to their friends, normal stuff like that. Ryan glanced up, gathering ideas as she saw Kellin limping around the gym in front of her. So she sped up, attempting to ignore the biting pain in her ribs that was getting harder and harder to ignore.

"Follow me," she hissed at Kellin as she ran by him, breaking into a full on sprint that went completely unnoticed by the coach as she sped across the gym.

The pain was so sharp now that Ryan couldn't actually properly breathe, and when she got to the small space behind the bleachers, she collapsed onto the floor.

The bleachers in the gym were folded up against the wall and were taken down for sports games and certain ceremonies, but were always kept up against the wall during gym class. The previous year, Brendon had found the little space behind the bleachers while chasing a stray volleyball, and had managed to sneak Ryan, their friend Jon, and sometimes Lynn back behind the bleachers to play cards and trade gossip. It had been fun, and they hadn't been caught, so Ryan found no reason not to invite Kellin back there as it was obvious that both of them were having trouble running and would much rather sit and talk to each other than put themselves through more torture out in the gym.

Kellin took longer than she expected to show up, and Ryan had even began to worry that he hadn't heard her and she would have to sit by herself in the back, which she didn't like, but he finally made it.

"Jesus," he panted, "christ." Ryan nodded in agreement, although the two words weren't really a statement, though they could easily be agreed with. Kellin sat down heavily, running his hands over his sweaty face. Ryan was still hunched over, her hands wrapped around her chest. The pair sat in silence for a while, catching their breath.

"Are you okay?" Kellin finally asked, knowing that something was wrong. Something was wrong, because the more Ryan tried to breath the more pressure was put on her chest and she was basically curled into a ball at this point but she couldn't fucking breathe and she didn't know what to do, she never knew what to do, and when she did, it never seemed to be the right thing.

"Ryan," he said, sounding more concerned than plausibly necessary. Ryan lay down flat on her back, shivering as the cold gym floor touched her hot skin.

"I'm fine, perfectly fine," she replied, laughing a bit at herself. Kellin didn't reply. She breathed deeply, holding her breath for long enough that it didn't hurt as much when she let it go.

"I thought you ran." Kellin said.

"I do."

"So why... why aren't you running?" God, it wasn't a stupid question at all. Kellin was probably grateful that Ryan had brought him back there, but she could still hear the worry in his voice.

"Because, pain."

"Pain?"

"Yes." Kellin didn't reply after that, and Ryan decided that she would let him figure it out for himself. There was more silence, and Ryan tried sitting up again. This time it felt okay, and she just decided to not over-exert herself any more for that day, although she would probably end up down at the track at two in the morning because she couldn't stand the feeling of the skin on her body. She and Kellin were sitting across from each other, and met each other's gazes.

"Period cramps are absolutely kicking my ass." It was a blatant lie that Kellin obviously believed, and Ryan wondered what his idea of what was wrong had been. There weren't too many possibilities as to why someone athletic ended up lying on the floor in the back of the gym in pain.

"I'm sorry. I honestly have no idea how girls do it, like, every single month you've gotta just... be in pain. And there's nothing you can really do about it except get pregnant, get old, or die." Kellin said, and Ryan would have found that somewhat amusing except she really didn't know how to feel about "girl" anymore, and how it felt to be associated with her. Because she never felt like a guy but being herself felt a little uncomfortable and if anything was uncomfortable, it was being confused about something as ridiculous as her gender.

And maybe it was PMS and maybe she was about to get her actual period but Ryan was really losing her patience with Kellin because she was a mess because there were ace bandages wrapped around her chest and he was a mess just because he was fat and that was his own fault. And then she hated him even more because he had ruined a perfectly good body and he was stupid because what kind of selfish act was that? She had sort of trailed off into a clenched-jaw and dark-eyed sort of daze, and Kellin was still panting like a fucking dog so then she asked him-

"Who would you be, if you could?"

"Someone I'm happy with."

:::::::

Ryan felt bad.

She didn't feel bad just because of the thoughts and odd bursts of anger flying around her head, but she physically felt bad because she was being stupid and trying to do stupid things to make her feel better about her body that might have been sort of dangerous and might have physically hurt her but at least she looked better, and that was what mattered, right? Feeling better is never put on a scale as important as looking better, and anyone can still look like shit and feel like heaven.

It wasn't fair that people always said "you look better," because anyone can take a shower and change their clothes and sleep a full night and eat breakfast for once, but that doesn't mean that their mental health has changed. Lots of times, people could look perfectly fine, or even better, and be doing the most destructive things to themselves.

There was also that sort of empty dissociative feeling inside her, which lead her to sitting on the floor in the locker room and thinking about what to do with herself. She knew that Jack was probably waiting for her outside and Kellin, who she was just growing to dislike for no reason more and more, might be out there too which made her want to leave even less. Jack had always been a pushy sort of person, and she knew that he was going to wait until she came out or else he would come in himself.

And, well, he did. He had probably counted off every person that had come down the hallway to make sure that Ryan hadn't slipped past him somehow, and was now casually sneaking into the girl's locker room because he was Jack Barakat and that was what he did. Ryan heard his footsteps before she heard his voice, and managed a little sigh that she honestly shouldn't have let out because he was onto her in a second.

"Ryan Ross, I know you're in here." His voice echoed around the walls, and then he appeared around the corner. "And there you are. On the floor. Are you alright?" That was the wrong question, and Jack sat down next to Ryan, and crossed his legs.

"I'm mad for no reason." It hurt to breathe and it hurt to talk and Ryan felt like she was on the verge of tears, but crying would hurt more than anything so she just held them back.

"That's okay. What are you mad at?" Maybe it was the way that Jack said what instead of who, but Ryan found herself softening and realizing that if there was anything she was mad at, it was definitely not Jack.

"Myself. Fucking... Kellin. The universe. Shoes." Jack nodded, as if her list made any amount of sense to him.

"What's wrong with shoes?"

"They smell." It was a good point. Jack fell silent.

"What about yourself?"

"I'm stupid."

"In what way?" Ryan almost found herself getting angry at how good Jack was at talking to people, and she ran a shaking hand through her sweaty hair.

"I'm always doing things that aren't smart. That aren't good for me, that-like- that might hurt me. It's stupid. I'm stupid." Ryan regretted the words as soon as they left her mouth, and she could feel the tears making their way to her eyes. Jack didn't say anything. There was a loud silence, and then Ryan got up.

"I've gotta go." Jack stood up with her, and protested instantly.

"Ryan, okay, you can't just say that- Ryan-"

"Stop!" She hadn't meant to yell but she was actually crying at this point and it really fucking hurt and Jack seemed to flinch back. "I'll tell you when I tell you." And she left, stormed down the hall with tears warm on her face. Kellin was standing at the end of the hallway for some reason, either waiting for Jack or Ryan or both of them, but he watched Ryan rush past him without a word.

:::::::

Ryan was crying and seeing Patrick run in with a little golden retriever puppy hadn't made her feel any better, and she supposed that that was saying something.

She was sitting on a couch in a back room of Under The Sun, crying because of pain and because of hopelessness and confusion and all those sorts of emotions that wanted to make her throw up and made her feel like life wasn't worth living. It wasn't like she felt that way a lot, but they had been showing up more and more often and she wasn't comfortable with them at all and it wasn't like she could tell them that they made her unhappy and could ask them to leave. She was sitting alone at a party and all the doors were locked and everyone there was someone she didn't like, it was a feeling of ultimate discomfort within herself that she didn't recognize and wasn't sure how to deal with, so maybe her way of dealing with it was sitting there crying and waiting for someone to come deal with her problems for her.

Which was what Gee Way was going to do.

Gee, Ryan supposed, was the only good thing in her life that wasn't going to leave her for a while, other than running. Running, though, wasn't a thing that could get up and run away from her, and Ryan wasn't expecting Gee to either, but she wasn't really sure what could and couldn't happen these days, so she just hoped that Gee wouldn't abandon her. And then Gee walked in, holding the squirming random puppy and looking as concerned as Ryan had ever seen her.

"What's wrong? I brought a puppy." Ryan, still crying, took the puppy, who smiled at her. She cried back at it.

"Ryan." Ryan tried to ask "yes?" or "what?" or something of the sort but was crying and just blubbered and debated wiping her teary face on the puppy.

"Ryan, I brought you a puppy. Her name is Izzy." Ryan curled up, cradling the little puppy close to her. She was still shaking hard, but had somehow managed to calm down in that short amount of time, possibly because of Gee, possibly because of the puppy, most likely because of both. She still hurt though, of course she hurt, now, she always seemed to be hurting. But the pity in Gee's eyes wasn't something she wanted either, she just wanted help and no one seemed to want to help her. But maybe she didn't want to help herself.

"C'mon, Ry, what's wrong?" Ryan had finally gotten to a place where she felt able to talk again, and took a very deep breath before speaking.

"Kellin Quinn is fat and I hate him for it." Gee snorted, and Ryan swept her fingers through Izzy's fur, wondering if that was a good enough excuse for Gee. Probably not.

"That's the reason you're having a breakdown on my couch?" She sounded righteous and bitchy. Nothing new coming from her.

"It's not your couch."

"It's more my couch then it is yours. You're upset because Kellin is fat?" It sounded terrible when Gee put it that way. Izzy smiled at Ryan, her dark brown eyes twinkling. Ryan supposed that being a dog might be the best thing ever.

"I'm upset because Kellin wasted a perfectly good body that he was lucky to have. And now he's unhappy with himself but that's his own fault." Gee didn't look as warm and kind as she usually did when talking with Ryan, and Ryan thought for a moment that she may have done something wrong.

"Do you think that maybe something else was going on?"

"Well-"

"What's actually wrong and why are you taking whatever it is out on your friends?" Ryan bit at her cheek. Gee sat. Izzy pawed at Ryan's hair.

"I'm confused." That was just the start of it, Ryan supposed. Out of all her emotions, confusion might have been a strong one but hatred might have been stronger. She wondered if it would have made more sense to just say "I hate myself and I don't know why." Gee must, or must have known, how that felt, of course she had, but Ryan wasn't going to be as blunt as that because she didn't want to seem too desperate for help but, well, showing up during work hours crying her face off and clutching at her ribs like they were broken was a sort of thing that attention thirty people did.

"About what?" More silence. Gee didn't make any jokes, and Ryan then realized that she had made this a serious situation.

"I don't think that I'm a girl." And that was that. Gee still didn't say anything. "But I don't think that I'm a boy either."

:::::::

Ryan went home and ran for a good two hours on the track until she felt like she had been lit on fire, but in a good way. If there was a good way to feel like she had been lit on fire. She got to do a good deal of thinking too, and realized that perhaps she didn't owe Jack a full apology, and she didn't owe Kellin one either but she had been so selfish and terrible earlier because she had taken out all of her hate on Kellin and though she hadn't said anything she had thought it all and she, well, she thought that it just simply wasn't fair of her. Maybe because she felt like his body was easier to hate, god, she didn't even know. So she had switched out the bandages on her chest for a sports bra and had gone down to the track late, late at night. Sometime after midnight. And she had ran.

It had felt good for a while, until everything started hurting. She kept going for far too long and then she collapsed on the side of the soccer pitch and felt everything around her move and twist and the world go round and round and round. She could feel everything.

She could feel her legs hurt, her arms hurt, her ribs hurt, her back hurt, her lungs her, her heart hurt. She could feel the stretch marks on her thighs and around her breasts, she could feel every single ounce of fat on her body, god, she missed when she had been a little kid. Skin and bones, bruised knees from trying to skateboard and messy hair that went down to her shoulders, back before she hadn't tried running, not really, back before she didn't know what hating herself felt like. Back before she lay on soccer pitches at two in the morning wondering whether the sky was going to shatter and rain down on her, back before she wondered if the hurt of shards of the sky tearing into her body would feel good.

In the end, she decided that it wouldn't.

"Agender," Gee had said- "it's not boy or girl, it's just nothing." Ryan didn't know what those words meant. She supposed that she would come to know what they meant, but she just so wished that she could have been born a boy, at least. As a boy, if she wanted to, she could stuff a stolen or borrowed bra and put on makeup and look pretty and wear girl's clothes and look feminine, at least. But no, she was a girl. A girl who had to bind to get a perfectly flat chest, a girl with feminine features and long hair that she was scared to cut, a girl who was a girl, a female, a woman, a fucking cunt who was really contemplating every single thing in her life at that moment. And maybe it had been all the running or all the crying or all of the terrible emotions pent up inside her, but Ryan just drifted off on the soccer pitch at two in the morning.

It was better that way, to be asleep. It always was.

:::::::

Ryan woke up when the cross country team interrupted her beauty sleep down on the track, and was unceremoniously kicked off of the pitch. With nowhere else to go, she headed back towards her room where she could take a scalding hot shower and then, well, then she would have to talk to Brendon. It was something she wasn't looking forward to. Lynn was awake when Ryan got back to her room, and was staring at the wall in a way that Brendon would call "avant garde" in a sloppy accent and then laugh.

"Hi." Lynn turned her head, raising her eyebrows in the little way that made it seem like she was trying to give a dirty look but was making it passive aggressive. Lynn was good at that sort of thing.

"You're here. Where were you last night?" Had Lynn been worried? Probably unlikely, but she was being all pissy which was always a hint that she was trying to hide or cover up what she really was actually feeling.

"I was with Brendon." Lynn nodded and made a face that was really, really passive aggressive.

"That's cool, 'cause Brendon was here last night asking where you were." Well, fuck Brendon. Lynn kept that stupid look on her face and Ryan narrowed her eyes and neither of them said anything but both of them were doing their own judging and hating.

"I'll be back." Ryan stormed out and she could almost hear a "hey!" from back in the room, because Ryan had just backed out of a perfectly good fight that Lynn could have probably used.

It didn't matter though, because Ryan was probably going to fight with Brendon because that's what she wanted to do, she was still mad at Kellin, and Gee, and herself, and Lynn, and- and fucking everyone, she was like a little punk teenager who didn't know what to do with their anger. She stormed across the campus, wondering who she would kick really hard in the shins if she ran across them.

Brendon's door was looking a lot meaner than usual, and Ryan knocked on at it like it wasn't seven in the goddamn morning. Spencer, however, opened the door and he was as high as the International Space Station. He blinked about fifty times rapidly before squinting at Ryan and yawning and squinting again and then saying-

"Ryan." Ryan nodded, almost starting to calm down just because she was talking to Spencer and not Brendon.

"Is Brendon here?" Spencer shrugged, and glanced back inside the room.

"I think he went somewhere. Listen, I made a perfectly functional bong out of a water bottle." Spencer sounded pretty overjoyed.

"That's great, Spence, pretty great, where did Brendon go?" Spencer shrugged again, and spun in a circle.

"A water bottle." He repeated. "Want to try it?" Ryan sighed in a way that spoke more exhaustion and disappointment than excitement about Spencer's water bottle bong, but she resolved to try to finish off the conversation in a sensible manner.

"Maybe later."

And so she was back, almost feeling like she was in a stupid movie montage where it follows people around when they don't know what they're doing or where they're going and it's like Portlandia and Arrested Development with all the jump cuts that make it funny and there he was.

"Brendon!" He was coming from the direction of the track, good god he had been looking for her, and he smiled and sped up his pace when he saw her.

"Hey, I was-"

"I need to talk to you. It's serious." His smile died and Ryan almost felt guilty.

"Now?" She almost felt like everything was falling apart.

"Yeah. I guess."

"Here?"

"Yeah, jesus, where else would you rather do it?" She spat. "I'm not a- I'm not a girl, really, and I don't know what's happening in my life but can you just... use they or them pronouns or something- I don't fucking know- and... and tell Spencer to get ahold of himself. And that I'm proud of his bong."


	9. Talk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> named after talk by coldplay and no you're not allowed to make fun of me for loving them. some mentions of abuse and eating disorders here.

Vic had been listening to music and music had never been a big deal. It was late at night and Jaime was smoking and everything was good and calm for once. Vic had wanted to go outside because earlier in the day he could have almost tasted the snow in the air; he loved feeling the cold, loved breathing it and feeling it slowly make his hands slow down and his breathing speed up to keep himself warm, and it was even colder at night which was better and maybe even going for a walk might have made him happy and Jaime knew all of this, but absolutely refused to go outside. San Diego had never been cold and at least it felt like home here, but all he could do was pretend that he was actually in charge of his own world.

Which he wasn't, really, not at all. So.

So they had fucked and Vic hadn't enjoyed any part of it but if Jaime did then it didn't matter how Vic felt. Of course. And then they had hung around in the hazy light while Jaime smoked and they talked about life. Everything had been okay, Vic hadn't said anything wrong for once, and then he had asked if he could put on music. And Jaime said "sure," which was surprising, because he barely let Vic do what he asked for. So Vic had put some music on and about two minutes into a song, Jaime had protested.

So Vic turned it off but he also sort of shut himself down, tuned out of his body and locked up his emotions because Jaime was probably going to start something. It never took long, because Jaime had tried to kiss Vic or something stupid like that, and Vic had pulled away. And then it had all gone to shit. Statements spat like- "why did you do that?" "am I doing something wrong, because I think it's just you." "is it because of the music?" "are you acting like a fucking child because I asked you to turn off the music?" And Vic turned his head farther away, moving to get up, and then everything had really gone to shit.

When he was younger, he had never known when to stop. He would be sarcastic and throw around comments that he knew were going to get him in trouble. And voices would be raised higher and higher until whoever was doing the shouting reached that scratchy range of scary and then, well, when someone's voice reaches the scratchy range of scary, then it's sort of a known thing that something has gone very wrong.

Jaime climbed to the scratchy range of scary faster than anyone had ever had before, well, that Vic knew, and knowing things became less important and defending himself became more important and it was really, really fairly terrible because most people never needed to defend themselves against people they loved.

Vic knew that he may have loved Jaime a long time ago, but things had changed and they weren't going to change back so he would just allow himself to be hurt more and more badly until everything just crumbled into a wonderful state of oblivion and nothingness.

Oblivion had never really had any set definition. Not really. Not to Vic. But he came to define it quite clearly while lying on his back in the grass in the freezing cold while barely being able to move. He had tried to get back to his room, which was in a completely different dorm, but had given up because it hurt too much to move. And he had sort of given up on the idea of really being anything at all anymore.

Oblivion was wanting to feel the cold and hating the cold once you get to feel it. That's what oblivion was. Oblivion was trying to hang onto the song that had been playing before things had gone wrong and pretending that the song could still be playing and things could still be okay. Losing A Whole Year. Oblivion was realizing how much of your life you had lost by being in a relationship with someone. Oblivion was barely being able to make the short walk back to your room without collapsing and oblivion was not being able to get your key out because your hands were shaking too hard.

A lot of times, Vic had felt like he had hit the bottom, but none of that could have ever compared to this. He wasn't even pissed at Kellin's need to always have the door locked that night, he wasn't pissed at all, maybe at himself for asking to turn the music on, and he felt sick and terrible and tired and useless and Kellin finally opened the door, it might have been around two in the morning and Kellin never slept anyways so Vic had just been expecting him to, and Vic ignored everything he said as he stumbled into the bathroom, kicked the door shut behind him, and vomited into the toilet. The taste of blood in his mouth was stronger than ever.

:::::::

I remember you and me used to spend the whole goddamned day in bed, hey boy, hey boy.

Hey boy, hey boy.

Fucking Third Eye Blind.

Vic was curled up in his blankets and had been all day. Drifting in and out of consciousness, all he had known all day long was that he was sweaty, in mild pain, and sort of confused. Of all things to feel, those weren't the worst, though he felt like there were grass stains on his clothes and he felt like dying a bit because deep down, he knew that something was really, really wrong, and didn't exactly want to come to terms with it. At some point, he properly woke up because he was so uncomfortable.

Skinny jeans covered in sweat were stuck to his legs, and his shirt felt like it was permanently plastered to his skin. His whole body ached and his mouth tasted sour and terrible. Dark hair matted in front of his eyes blocked his vision and his arms ached too much to move it out of his eyes, but his hearing wasn't blocked by anything but the blankets over his head. Which he barely twitched out of the way to listen.

It was the sound of food. Like, bags crumpling, chewing, and whatever else; it didn't surprise Vic that Kellin had spent his day eating. He moved his head the slightest bit and moved the blankets back a minuscule amount to not let Kellin know that he was awake, just so he could see what Kellin was doing.

He looked absolutely miserable, and Vic took it that he wasn't the only one. His normally pale face was flushed and his hands shook every time he brought them to his mouth. All sorts of assorted food wrappers and bags surrounded him, taking up a good portion of the couch around him, and most of them looked fairly empty. Every move that Kellin made seemed like it wasn't his own, and he looked like he might be sick. As Vic watched in curiosity and confusion, he came to realize that there were so many kinds of pain that he had never even considered to exist at all.

The pain he knew the best was bright and hard, it was kicks and punches and bruises and cuts, it was right in the face and it faded eventually, but not like the words did. Words took longer to get rid of, words took longer to fade away. Bruises and marks on skin disappeared so much easier than words did in anyone's mind. But words, Vic thought, weren't the worst part. For him, it was everything and anything emotional and manipulating. He wouldn't have been lying in a bed with dried blood on his face and tears and pain and permanent scars all over him if Jaime hadn't once said- "if you leave me I'm going to kill myself," or something along those lines because that was what had kept him in the relationship for so long, and that was the worst kind of pain he knew. Pain that he would inflict upon others by trying to rid himself of pain.

But he didn't know pain like someone not understanding basic terms, like the word "no," because no was supposed to mean no, right? He didn't know pain like dragging box cutters down his wrists and pouring pills down his throat, he didn't know pain like waking up in the hospital high off of pain meds, he didn't know pain like not having a basic healthy relationship with food because of himself, no, Vic had never even considered what it would be like to live with a different kind of pain, a kind that was external but internal too, a kind that hurt so badly at some points that life didn't seem worth living anymore because it all seemed so endless.

And Kellin did, and Vic felt his tense and sore body relax and his eyes sort of narrow in concern because he was worried about the boy sitting on the beaten down couch where Jaime had first tried to kiss him, but he didn't know what to do. At all. Ever. So he lay, curled under his blankets with his eyes just above them, and watched.

Kellin seemed completely out of it, in some other world where it was always okay to eat thousands upon thousands of calories in one sitting, but he snapped out of it almost all at once. His shoulders hunched forward, and he doubled over, bringing his hand up to run along his face. Vic watched his hand. It didn't seem to belong to him. The fingers on the hand were long and thin, almost feminine in a way. And they shook, they trembled as he pressed them against his face and, well, all of him seemed to be shaking. Panicking. Breaking. Vic felt like he had to do something, to step in and save the day, but Kellin had held him in his lap at two in the morning the previous night and had cleaned the blood off of his face, not that Vic knew that, and then Kellin had taken off his jacket because it had bloodstains on it and tucked him into bed, not that Vic knew that, and then Jaime had stopped by the next morning and after he left, Kellin had found a terrible, overwhelming need to binge and had told himself that this would be the last time and was doing it for his own good, not that Vic knew any of this.

Sympathy and pity and all of those sorts of emotions were felt when Vic watched Kellin struggle to get up, when he heard all the wrappers crinkle and crack; both of them felt so bad and Vic almost felt like closing his eyes and properly pretending to be asleep because this felt like something far too personal to be watching.

Someone was falling apart right in front of him and he was so utterly powerless to help him. It took about a minute for Vic to find the tear running down Kellin's face and then that was it, that was too much. Although it hurt like a fucking bitch, Vic sat up, wiping his sweaty hair out of his eyes. Kellin jumped a bit, looking around in a panic and wiping at his own face.

"Vic-I-" He began, stammering and stuttering.

"Can we please talk?"

::::::: (fdhjc inm SO EMO IM SO EMO IM SO SORRY THIS ISNT EVEN THAT BAD I JUST HATE WRITING SAD STUFF BUT I DO IT SO MUCH WHY DO I DO THIS IM SO SORRY)

Kellin had sunk back into the couch except the wrappers have been cleaned off of it, and Vic was sitting upright and cross-legged on his respective bed. He had showered and changed and taken the blankets and sheets off of his bed because they smelled like the sweat that wasn't associated with sex and was more closely associated with sickness while Kellin had cleaned up his own mess and brushed his teeth about a billion times.

So there they were.

"How much did you see?" Kellin asked first, probably asking what was most important to him at the moment. "... All of it?" It? Vic wondered what he meant by it.

"It?" It felt good talking to someone who wouldn't shout at him for asking stupid questions or maybe not talking as much as he was wanted to, he felt sort of free and okay and it was always odd how he always felt better while talking to someone that wasn't his boyfriend.

"The... binge." Kellin had an issue with maintaining eye contact throughout conversations, a problem that Vic had used to have until Jaime had grabbed his face and turned towards his own and spat "you look at me when I'm talking to you."

"Some. Of it. Not all, but... but why? Why did you...?" Their conversation was made up of a lot of unfinished sentences that were still meant to be understood. The thing was, they were. Kellin shrugged and opened and closed his mouth before deciding to close it and then just thought. There was a lot he could say, it seemed like, and he wet his lips and opened his mouth countless times before finally speaking.

"I've got a problem. With food. As if it isn't obvious." The last part was mumbled under his breath, and Vic felt more pity twist in his chest. Because every word that left Kellin's mouth was so damn uncertain but he honestly wasn't as ugly as he thought he was, he had shockingly clear skin that was such a particular pale shade, and dark, dark brown hair that set off his skin accordingly. Then there were his eyes, the huge turquoise eyes that either showed so much emotion all the time or showed none at all. His features were sharp, and that was obviously clear even though they had been somewhat softened by fat. Vic wouldn't have wanted him to look any different, but he could imagine Kellin with a hawkish face and an absolutely killer jawline if he had looked... different, which he didn't, he was the way he was, and that was perfectly fine. 

"But it's not... not, like, anorex- no- it's, the, it's the opposite. Is it?" Vic asked. Kellin looked up at him really quick before turning his eyes back to the ground, and he seemed just so upset.

"It's complicated." Vic didn't reply. "It's... well, I guess it is the opposite. I don't know what it is." He swallowed hard and kept up intense eye contact with the floor.

"I just... I just wish I had an alright body. Just an alright body, not a perfect one, not anything stunning, just something... alright. Acceptable." It was then that Vic started thinking about how pretty Kellin was and how it wasn't fair that he didn't realize it.

"Your body- I mean, I think you have a pretty okay body-"

"You wouldn't know," scoffed Kellin, and then moved to change the subject. "So let's talk about you."

"Oh, but we haven't quite finished-"

"I have my own questions about what happened to you, so how about we take turns, yeah?" Vic muttered an angsty little yeah in return but immediately felt like he had been put on the spot as soon as it was his turn to talk.

"Yeah, well, my boyfriend is a dick." This time it was Kellin with the pitying looks, because it was so much more than Jaime being a dick, and Vic realized just how annoying it all was.

"Can't you break up-"

"I don't think you realize how hard that is. Have you been in an abusive relationship, Kellin?" This was met with a dismal look and Vic realized that he might have asked the wrong snarky question, but Kellin just shook his head no. Thank god. Vic paused for a moment, as if considering how to explain it all to Kellin.

"It's like when you try so hard to get something right. Like when you study really hard for a big test and put so much work into it and work so hard on getting a good grade but you fail. And you can't get out of this class, it's too late in the year, and you've got to just keep going and trying again and again but you keep failing and you think you're doing the right thing but turns out you've been doing something wrong the whole time. And what I've been doing wrong this whole time is being in this relationship in the first place."

"Yeah." Kellin said. His voice seemed heavy and his whole demeanor seemed to have changed. Vic didn't know what he had said wrong, but obviously it had been something because of the way the air seemed so poisonous and the way Kellin wouldn't meet his eyes again.

"I just. He knew that I had been hurt before like- back at home- my dad, he was a dick too. All the time. And it was like as soon as I got out of being hurt by him I was already being hurt by someone else and it was always people I thought I loved-I, do you believe in love?" He switched the topic around quickly and Kellin still seemed awkward and out of place.

"No." Vic didn't follow it up with a why or a why not, instead he just said nothing and pretended to understand. Through it all, Vic still believed in love and maybe that said that he was weak and wouldn't learn from his mistakes or maybe it said that at least he still believed in something.

"But I'm going to. Break up with him. I never liked him as more than a close friend in the first place. It was... I guess he just pressured me into a relationship." Kellin was nodding so much that Vic began to wonder about just how much he could relate to this.

"Are we going back to you now?" Vic asked, and Kellin sighed and rolled his eyes. Vic took it as a yes.

"What do you want to know?" A Q&A then, well, that was exactly what Vic wanted. "Two questions and I'm done." That changed the game completely, and Vic narrowed his eyes. It was like twenty questions but a million times worse.

"Why don't you sleep?" Kellin immediately started chewing at his lip and Vic realized that he had hit a sensitive spot. All of Kellin's nervous habits seemed to exhibit themselves, the lip biting, hair tugging, shirt pulling, it was all a lot to watch while he came up with an answer, and he seemed to gather a semblance of one together because he mumbled out something like,

"I have nightmares." Well, that sucked. So Vic thought of the next question he would ask, and kept going at the scab on his face.

"Don't pick at it," Kellin muttered, turning his head and almost acting like he hadn't said it. Vic stopped picking at it and then asked-

"What do you have nightmares about?"

"Um." He said it right away, like a reflex or a shield he could hold out in front of him to protect him from all the curiosity being thrown at him. But a shield wasn't going to prevent the person holding it from saying anything else, and Kellin fell silent as though he had nightmares about "um" and considered that a specific and acceptable answer. It may have occurred to Vic that it might have been too personal of a question but the sun was going down and both of them had somewhat agreed to this and it was Vic's second question so it deserved an answer. Kellin was hanging his head like he was waiting for Vic to take it back and Vic was going to take it back any second now but then Kellin cleared his throat.

"I have nightmares about people coming into my room at night." Vic wasn't sure if that was what he was expecting, but he nodded slowly. He was still so curious, so worried, what had happened to him?

"Is that why you lock the door?" Kellin's incessant door locking had always been sort of annoying, because if Vic left for a second, Kellin would lock the door right behind him and take ages to unlock it again, as if there was a certain required time that the lock had to stay locked for.

"Yeah." There was more, obviously, but Vic had used up his two questions and Kellin was obviously done with communicating, and, well, that was just that.


	10. Limousine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> named after limousine by brand new listen to the song at your own risk it's very sad

"Are there people in your life that you spend too much time worrying about? Do you put their mental health and safety before your own? Think about that."

Tay hadn't meant to be too deep and serious that day at the lunch table but she had brought up something that she had read in this weird article, perhaps paraphrasing it to an extent, and Jack and Ryan didn't stare at her like it was an odd thing to bring up, a topic like that, but she wanted to discuss it and rant about Avery and how much she fucking hated all the bad luck in her life and that she spent all her time thinking about Avery and really, she just wanted to break down and have someone hold her and wrap her in a blanket and assure her that she was going to be okay.

It took all she had not to say that, and instead sit blank faced at the lunch table while Ryan messed with her hair and Jack flipped a water bottle with a semi-loose cap around, splattering the table with water droplets. 

"Do you feel that way?" Ryan had cleared her throat in an only semi-awkward way after maybe thinking over Tay's badly worded question about how weird it was to always put other people first, or if sometimes everyone spent too much people worrying about each other and not enough about themselves.

"I might but I can't tell. I think it's up for other people to tell. Which is another reason that it's weird. Everything is just really weird." Ryan nodded and avoided eye contact some more while Jack did a great deal of nothing. Kellin wasn't there, making up some sort of work. All of them seemed to be as though they were holding back from blurting something out, and their wary eyes all glanced around at each other like they were in a horror movie and were waiting for something otherwise known as a jumpscare to happen and freak lots of viewers out.

"Um." That was Jack, and his voice was as hoarse as all of theirs. Maybe they could have a guessing game as to which one of them had been up late crying and screaming into their pillow. Maybe they could rule Jack out because, as he totally didn't mention on a daily basis, he had a boyfriend. No good boyfriend would let Jack Barakat spend his night screaming and crying into his pillow. "Are we getting serious?" He asked. Ryan immediately nodded as if readily throwing herself onto the train to serious land.

"Can we get serious?" Tay wouldn't object to getting serious. They all stared around again and Jack leaned back as if there was nothing serious that he had to mention, he was just being a good friend.

He was.

The silence wasn't awkward but it was the kind that audibly rang in the air, as ironic as it was. Ryan obviously had something to say and Tay was trying not to be as evident about what was going through her mind.

"Yes, right, seriousness. We're serious. Uh." Ryan picked at the nails on her left thumb. She had chipped nail polish and faded Henna on her arms. The way she looked, with her choppy, overgrown hair, decorated arms, little necklaces and bracelets adorning her wrists and neck, and old, hemp-y clothes, she looked like quite the hippy. It wasn't helped by the fact that she owned the famous Volkswagen van that usually sat in its designated parking space out in the teacher's parking lot.

"Yeah, right, so how-right, uh, could you guys..." Ryan trailed off and seemed to completely hesitate before continuing. "Could you use they or them pronouns for... for me?"

"Of course," was Jack's immediate reaction, and Tay saw Ryan hang her, their head but she also saw the little happy glint in their eyes and the small smile play on their lips, was that it? Was all Ryan needed was to ask for different pronouns and be supported for instant happiness? Tay wished that it was that easy for her.

"Yeah, sure... indubitably." It was a fun word and it made Tay giggle a bit and it made Ryan look up and smile even more, man, it was nice to make people smile.

"Are we still getting serious?" Tay asked quickly, changing the subject back to things that no one wanted to talk about but, in the end, had to.

"If you have something to add to this getting serious session," Jack said. The way they were all talking was amusing and Tay would be giggling more except she was nervous this time, and it was like she had just let someone present before her in class but now it was her turn and she was as nervous as ever. But, as no one said anymore, best for last, right? She supposed that that was how it worked at concerts. Openers are worse, they come on before. The better band plays last. That was something that wasn't going to change. Perhaps that was always going to be the eternal "best for last" example. It wasn't a bad one.

"My little sister, uh, wants to meet you guys. So, well, yeah, we need to visit her. Soon." The soon hurt her because she knew why it had to be soon and in her head it sounded so terrible, oh yeah, you need to visit soon or else she's gonna die and she'll never have met you and oh, oh god-

"She's, um, stuck in the hospital." And that sounded too innocent, and Tay didn't know how to easily tell her friends that yes, her sister was dying.

"What happened to her?" Jack asked. Bad allergic reaction? Broken leg? Something that wasn't so bad? Jack probably thought that by "stuck," Tay meant that she had been in there all week and was getting a bit lonely but oh, no, it was so different. There were so many things that Tay wanted to say right then and there, about how she didn't know when her sister would stop being able to talk or stop being able to breathe on her own and she had a breathing thing at night but she could manage during the day and man, Tay just wished so badly that it was her in that bed.

"Well. Her cells are fucked up, well, see, she's sick. Really, really sick. Like..." Their eyes were watching her and the sympathy was about to roll in after her next words- "like she might, um. Like she doesn't have so long left."

The silence was almost overpowering, and Tay shouldn't have felt embarrassed but it only felt right to hang her head and hold her breath right then and Jack said the customary-

"Oh, shit. I'm sorry." Tay nodded as Ryan added in her, their, input, and Tay tried to lighten things up because nothing was as awkward as announcing to your friends that your little sister, who was dying, wanted to meet them.

"She's really psyched about meeting people though. Like you guys, I've told her so much about you."

"What's her name?" Ryan asked.

"Avery. She's seven." They nodded again, like bobbleheads, and Tay could've written out enough conceits to fill up the whole San Francisco bay, metaphors about how awkward the moment was and how the air conditioning hummed and how she had ruined their lunch and how she just wanted Avery to be happy before she couldn't feel anything anymore.

:::::::

It was in science class that day when Tay realized that she had snapped. She had told her teacher to shut up with so much ferocity in her voice that Kellin gave her a warning look. She had never received anything more than a glance from him or faltering eye contact during conversations, but she realized as they were becoming closer friends that he was allowed to give her warning looks for screaming at the teacher.

The teacher, it was just... his voice. And the way he looked at her, he always looked too hard, somehow, and she felt bad and uncomfortable and she didn't like him and he was in her face, leaning down, like, into her, and she had leaned away to get away from him and the teacher had been talking to both her and Kellin but had his ugly head bent over her work and was not addressing Kellin in any way and then he had looked up and her face had been so close to his and he had been talking and talking and she felt so uncomfortable and Kellin seemed on the verge of saying something and then just-

"Shut up!" The teacher, Mr. Jenkins, stepped back with this disappointed and somewhat confused look on his face and Tay realized that he may start shouting at her and then Kellin gave her that look. It was the most emotion she had ever seen him posses, and it stopped her from saying anything else. "I'm sorry," she said instantly to the teacher, who scowled at her but walked away. No reprimanding. His wife was the snotty band teacher who apparently had no clue what she was doing and had already broken the school's drum kit. They made a fantastic pair.

"Are you alright?" Asked Kellin in his quiet voice when Mr. Jenkins had found some other student's neck to breathe down.

"I'm just. I hate him. I fucking hate him." Tay said, her voice not having lost any of the anger that it had possessed just a few minutes ago.

"Yeah. Yeah..." Kellin's eyes had followed him across the room with a developing glare on his face. "He's a creep."

Oddly enough, having someone agree with her and voice it for once calmed Tay down a bit, but she was still nervous about how awkward it would be with Ryan and Jack later. She was debating inviting Kellin along, but she felt like that would make too many people and besides, Avery hadn't wanted to meet him, and it wasn't though she was basing this all off of what her sister wanted except, well, she was.

The pair still had classwork to do, and Tay turned back to the microscope that they were both standing over. A whole sheet filled with circles meant for drawings was laid out in front of her, with only three of the eight circles properly filled out, labeled and colored in. They were supposed to be working individually, which, surprisingly, most of the class was, as they were in an honors class and had strongly weighted grades. Jenkins kept his eye on them to make sure that they were doing their work, and mainly by themselves, but Tay hadn't been able to concentrate and Kellin had been ahead of her anyways, so they kept having to switch off on what lens they were using and Tay had switched Kellin's high power lens back to scanning which meant he had to refocus the entire thing and it was just a mess.

The clock warned that there were fifteen minutes left for Tay to get her entire sheet done, and she heaved a defeated sigh which was closely followed by the "I give up" gesture of putting her head in her hands.

"Hey." Kellin said, pulling his face back from the microscope. "If you start answering some of the questions I'll do the drawings for the rest of your sheet." Tay took the offer right away and immediately started answering the questions based off of the drawings on Kellin's sheet. They worked this way until the end of class, which was marked by the ringing of the bell which had always sounded sort of like the airplane seatbelt sign signal going off, to Tay.

As they approached the door to be handed their homework, Tay shrunk behind Kellin and kept her head down as they walked out, but heard her name being called in the terrible rasp of Jenkins' voice. She turned around with an eye roll at the ready, Kellin right behind her.

"You're staying for detention." Tay heard Kellin's scoff from behind her, and she straightened her back and narrowed her eyes.

"No, no I'm not." Jenkins' odd blue eyes seemed to pierce into her own, and the general creepiness of it all freaked her out so much and at least she had a proper excuse not to sit by herself for detention in a room not designated for detention with a teacher that looked at her too hard.

"And why is that?"

"Because my little sister is in the hospital and I had previously scheduled a visit for her and I think I'd rather spend my time after school with someone who is worth every single second of my time than a science teacher who doesn't seem to realize how the real world works. Thanks, but no thanks. Make an appointment next time." Kellin didn't give her any look this time, he just gave her a little smile and fell behind a bit when she jogged down the hall to get away from the science teacher. Once he caught his breath and they were walking at a normal pace that didn't involve nervous glances behind them and bursts of speed, they went back to speaking.

"Sorry about your sister." And it was pity that came first, always pity.

"Can't be helped." They finally got outside, made it out of the smelly science building and into the bright sunshine. Kellin breathed and looked around, taking in everything. He always seemed so amazed to be outside.

"Are you going now?" He asked. No, I'm going to meet up with our other friends and go with them and leave you out of this, though I think you may be my best friend. Not Ryan. I like you better, and that sounds mean, but it's true. I want you to come but my sister doesn't and that shouldn't dictate everything, but in this situation it does. I wish I had some sense of bravery in me.

"Yeah."

"I hope it goes well."

"Thanks."

:::::::

"Hospitals are weird here." They were sitting on the bus, and the awkward air had been somehow cleared out but their eyes kept flickering around and Tay was just hoping that things would work out alright. Ryan seemed distracted and nervous, their brown eyes seemed to be watching everyone on the bus with odd closeness and attention, while Jack seemed how he always did, just. Jack.

"In what way?" Jack asked, doing a magnificent job of blocking off the aisle by stretching his legs across it.

"People are mean." Ryan scoffed, finally directing their attention back to the real world.

"People are always mean at hospitals. I mean, what do you expect? They spend all day dealing with sick people who have all kinds of weird needs. Imagine how terrible it must be to be a nurse." Ryan totally didn't seem to be acting passive aggressive about hospitals.

"Well, they suck." Said Tay. That wasn't an opinion, that was a fact and all of them knew it.

"What do you want to do? In life, like, that's not being a nurse. Later." Jack asked, directing the question at Tay because everyone knew, whether they liked it or not, that Ryan would one day either be an olympic athlete or a world class photographer. Or both.

"God, I don't fucking know. I'm a senior in high school and I have no special interests whatsoever. Yeah, I've got no clue. What do you think I could be?"

"Bus driver," said Ryan absentmindedly, squinting at the map of bus stops along the side of the ceiling of the bus.

"Yeah, that." Jack said, laughing a bit. As they got off of the bus at the hospital, Tay silently cursed herself for bringing her friends there with her. Of course, Avery wanted to meet them and of course, Tay wanted to make her sister happy but she wanted herself to be at least somewhat happy and god, she still didn't know who to put first. Shocked and ashamed that that selfish thought had crossed her mind, Avery always came first, Tay tried to put all that shit out of her mind and instead focused on the fact that she was about to make her sister really, really happy. Which she did often, and that was a good thing. Tay supposed that if she was good at anything, it was being able to keep people happy.

And again, that never always involved keeping her happy. But she walked into the hospital and gave lame smiles to doctors and nurses she didn't recognize because shifts were weird here and she had to check in at two different parts of the hospital because it was so big, and she felt too in charge for her own liking by the way that Ryan and Jack followed her around as they were completely clueless in there.

Finally, they reached Avery's room. She was listening to something, probably an audio book. Her eyes had never worked too well, but she was losing her vision more and more as the days went on. It seemed like she was losing everything as the days went on, and Tay was reminded every single day that life wasn't fair, and would never ever be fair. At that, Tay thought of those La Dispute lyrics. "I will never trust ice. I will never trust a single thing." Because ever since Tay had fallen through the ice, she felt as though moving to San Francisco had been crawling back out from under the surface and right now, she was in between. Right now, she was freezing cold and shaking, her hair wet and her clothes soaked. There were two options, now.

There was getting warm. There was making her way back to somewhere, anywhere, changing her clothes, falling asleep in a warm place surrounded by warm people, there was still believing in Avery and believing in life and not ever giving up for the sake of all the people that she knew who had never even gotten a chance to try.

Or their was getting pneumonia. There was falling ill, staying on the ice, and freezing. Freezing and dying. Sometimes the second option seemed easier but Tay knew as she saw her sister smile when she found out that Tay had brought her friends, that she couldn't give in to the sadness that gaped like an unseen pothole in a ruined road. Somehow, she knew it was there and she knew that it could touch her if she let it, but she could dodge it. Turn onto a paved road. It might be shaky for a bit but it would all even out and she had to make that turn, hit the signal, turn the wheel, make the trip and get her way onto a smoother path and then and there, Tay decided that giving up on Avery was not an option. Maybe on her mom, maybe on her friends if it came to that, but not Avery. Never Avery.

They played Risk for a while. Jack turned out to be extremely competitive when it came to board games, which Avery was trying to battle as well as she could by making as many alliances with Ryan as she could. Tay played, but in a sort of out of body way as she waited for the doctor to appear, because he always did. It was as Avery took over Russia, much to Jack's dismay, when Tay saw the warm face of Avery's doctor, last name Kemp, first name something she had forgotten. It started with a L, or an M, somewhere in that location of the alphabet. She was nice enough, and knew what she was doing, but it was obvious that there was nothing she really could do. She and Tay made eye contact which was enough for her to politely excuse herself and meet her outside in the hallway.

"So." She started.

"You brought guests." Doctor Kemp observed, glancing back inside the room.

"Yeah. I want her to be happy." The doctor nodded with her stupid serious expression looking serious-er, and that was never ever a good sign and Tay felt her heart start sinking. "Have you got news?" She asked, bracing herself for the worst.

"Nothing new, really. I just want you to know that this next month... it's probably going to be the last one in which she's really going to be in charge of herself. From what we can tell, her health is steadily declining, and it's going to get worse and worse." It wasn't as bad as she had expected, because she knew all of this, but it still didn't sound good at all.

"What's going to happen to her?" Kemp paused, and watched Avery again.

"Her sight will probably go first. And then, well, her brain will sort of. Well. She'll stop speaking as much, or at all, and if she does she probably won't be able to make out cohesive sentences or words. And then her motor skills, her breathing, and then, her heart..." She trailed off and Tay got the just of what she was saying.

"So she'll be dead by the new year." It was too blunt, and Tay almost felt like she had hurt herself by saying it.

"Most likely. I'm sorry, Tay, we're trying our best to find a sort of cure-"

"I know. I'm going to go now." Doctor Kemp hesitated, again, but then nodded because this was a teenager she was dealing with, not a real parental figure. Tay went back inside the room with shaky hands to find that Ryan had captured most to all of Africa, Jack only had some of Australia and lower Asia, and Avery had all of South America and Europe. 

At least she would be able to win one last time.


	11. The Problem With The Big Picture Is That It's Hard To See

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> named after the problem with the big picture is that it's hard to see by mayday parade fuck them and their extra long song titles. (just kidding i'd die for them my boys my #1 guys i . love mayday parade)

Guilt was a terrible emotion, especially when whoever was feeling the guilt couldn't do anything about it. Which was usually a key part of guilt, a sort of helplessness that sunk in because lots of time guilty people couldn't find a way to apologize for what they had done.

Jaime Preciado was extremely guilty. And he had apologized, but that never did anything. Every apology was such an obvious lie that it almost made him disappointed in himself, because he was disappointed in himself, because he kept hurting someone who he thought he loved. But maybe not. Vic had said it once, that what they had wasn't love. In Jaime's opinion, he shouldn't have said it. And maybe after he had said that Jaime had hurt him a bit, just a bit because he didn't want it to be true.

He was so guilty.

Guilty because Vic Fuentes had shown up one year as a the shyest fucking kid who barely spoke and often rubbed at the little white scar under his eye. A boy who had blushed when Jaime spoke to him but hesitated in saying anything back to him. A boy who had slowly directed sly looks and knowing grins back at Jaime when they were sent his way. A boy who had stopped flinching when he was touched in any way, a boy who had stopped tensing up whenever anyone told him to "hurry up," in any way, god Vic had been so hurt and the only person he had ever really trusted by then was Jaime and Jaime was-

Jaime was guilty.

Guilty of betraying Vic's trust, of taking him back to square one, of ruining everything that they had worked towards.

There was a point where Jaime knew that it was going to happen. A lot of it was Kellin's fault. Jaime didn't know Kellin and he was glad that he didn't because every time Jaime came in any sort of contact with him, he was reminded of Vic when they had first met. Except Kellin had different things going on, but it was somehow the same, in a way. Kellin had the same anxious demeanor and obviously hesitant sort of nature that Vic had had before, except that Jaime was in no way attracted to Kellin. Jaime wasn't really showing any respect to Vic anymore but things had changed since Kellin had shown up.

For both of them.

Jaime had grown unnecessarily paranoid since Kellin had shown up, and had tried to make Vic feel bad about things like eating, taking his food and saying things like- "do you want to look like him?" There were some nights where Vic had dissolved into tears, wanting to be angry but not being allowed to so instead going straight to sadness, always asking what was wrong with himself. That had hurt Jaime. But it had hurt Jaime to see Vic try to break away from him, to spend more days locked in his own room with Kellin rather than spending time with his boyfriend, it had hurt to see Vic seem sort of happier, healthier, and that's what had made Jaime more angry.

And now Vic was standing outside the door, his eyes all teary and his nails being bitten to shreds.

"Why can't you just come in?" Jaime asked, asking the same thing he had been asking ever since Vic had appeared at his door. Jaime had known what was coming and Vic knew that if he set one foot in that room that the bruises fading on his face would just be brought right back around.

"Jaime-" Vic's voice wobbled and broke and he wiped at his face and god Jaime just wanted to wipe away his tears and tell him that it was okay, that it wouldn't happen again and this time it was for real, this time he promised, but he knew it wasn't going to happen and he could feel his heart in his chest, he really could, and he wondered if it was breaking.

"I can't be in a relationship with you anymore." A tear fell down Vic's face, and Jaime watched as he wiped it away. He felt sick.

"Yeah." Jaime said. They stood in silence for a long time, and Vic finally looked up to make eye contact.

"It's been fun." It had been, it had been so much fun for a year, the best year of Jaime's life. And he nodded, biting at his lip.

"I love you." Vic's eyes didn't leave him. Until they did. He broke his gaze away, turned his scowl to the ground and said,

"This wasn't love." And then he left. Jaime couldn't do anything about it, couldn't do jack shit, all he could do was watch as the only person he had ever loved walked away from him with his head down. He had broken Vic, again, he had broken someone and this time he wasn't sure if there was any way to fix it. 

On the way back to his room, this time, Vic didn't collapse and start crying because this time was different, so different. Everything seemed different, the sky seemed clearer, the ever dull stars somehow seemed brighter, every breath he breathed was his own for once, there was no hand around his neck, no dark cloud in his peripheral vision, it was like he had taken off a mask and unplugged his ears, it was like he could taste the moon and hear the ground, it was like heartbreaking euphoria and it was so magical.

But magic never lasted forever, maybe it lasted a year or a month or a few weeks but this magical feeling lasted the course of Vic's walk back to his room, and it all seemed to be snuffed out when he returned to his room and heard the sink and the shower running at the same time which was always somewhat odd, and of course there were food wrappers laying around. Maybe that was what killed the magic, realizing that not everyone could get rid of their major problems by telling them that they didn't love them anymore. Or hadn't loved them at all. And maybe that was what made Vic sad again, realizing that the next morning he would wake up feeling heavy and alone and sad because all the ties had been severed. He could do whatever he wanted now, but he wasn't sure what he wanted. He could eat what he wanted, go where he wanted, be who with he wanted. If he wanted, he could talk to Alex again. Go back to Under The Sun, go somewhere he wanted to, he could sleep in and go to bed late, or go to bed early and wake up early, he was so free and all the freedom was terrifying.

Then the bathroom door opened and there was Kellin, his hair sweaty and his face pale. He looked sick, and then looked at Vic who was standing there in the room with a sort of expressionless look on his face.

"You're here." Kellin said. It was very completely unnecessary, but Vic nodded to it anyways simply because it was true. "And you're okay." The made Vic smile again, an almost half laugh bubbling up from his chest.

"Yeah." But his smile died when he noticed how nervous Kellin seemed, and Vic supposed that he had binged, or something, and really Vic just wanted to go out and do something.

"Do you want to go somewhere?" Vic asked, already coming up with something in his head.

"Um. Where?" Kellin was hovering back towards the couch, and gently picked up the wrappers that littered it. All empty, as always.

"This... park. We can watch the sky." The way that Vic was acting almost worried Kellin, the way he kept smiling and the way he kept swinging his arms and raising his hand to rub at one of his eyes, the way he kept rocking back and forth on his feet.

"Could I, uh, shower?" Vic nodded slowly, and moved his head back and forth a bit. He stuck out his tongue a bit when he grinned, and Kellin felt sort of awkward and he was possibly quite obviously blushing.

"Yeah. 'Course." And Vic sat down on the floor, trying to arrange his legs in a meditation position. Maybe he was high, Kellin decided.

Once back in the bathroom, he brushed his teeth again before turning on the shower again. Except this time he was properly going to use it, not just have it as background noise to him vomiting into the toilet. It had been the most terrifying thing. He hadn't purposely made himself throw up for a long time, and hadn't this time either, he had never liked that. Whenever he had done that in the past, he had felt like he couldn't breathe for a while before and after he threw up, and it sort of made him feel a certain level of out of control that he absolutely hated. This time, he had binged with nothing of it in mind, except he hadn't eaten specifically more than usual, but he had thrown up. Against his will. It had been terrible.

Just like showering was, which he only did when he looked really bad which he knew was gross but he hated hated hated feeling all of his body around him with no clothes over him to provide a barrier between everything, and it just, sucked. Always. He washed his hair thoroughly and then tried to actually wash the rest of his body but it seemed harder than ever, so he just didn't. There were so many things that he couldn't be bothered to do anymore.

Vic was lying on the floor when Kellin came back out of the bathroom, and sat up immediately.

"I broke up with him." Were the first words out of his mouth.

"What?" Kellin asked, sort of oblivious and sort of hoping that what Vic had said was true.

"Jaime. I broke up with him. We're done. So now, I'm going to go somewhere I want to without him telling me not to. With someone I want to." That made Kellin's face get all red again, and Vic properly smiled at him.

It turned out, they were going somewhere sort of far. Kellin didn't want to take buses and since there was no other option, the two walked halfway across San Francisco, which really wasn't a big deal for Vic because he had made the walk many times, but Kellin had trouble keeping up with his friend, his knees and ankles aching and screaming out in protest as they trekked through the streets. Finally, they ended up at Under The Sun. It was closed, of course, it was late at night, but they were there regardless and Vic stared up at the storefront with a sort of awed look on his face that Kellin didn't ask about. And then they kept walking.

They walked and walked and walked and Kellin was sure that they would end up back in Oregon by the end of the night, but Vic seemed to realize that Kellin was tiring and just a little confused about what was happening. They had reached the bottom of possibly the steepest street in all of California, and Vic paused for a moment.

"We're gonna sit down up there, it's got probably the nicest view in the whole entire city. It's magic up there." It was a place that hadn't been ruined by Jaime, and it was a place that Vic hadn't gotten to visit in years.

Kellin waited a little longer before following Vic up the hill because he was debating what would happen if his legs just gave out from under him because they weren't bothered to carry him anymore. Things like that were the reasons that Kellin still found himself alone in the room binging whenever he could, because he felt at least full of something when he ate. Hungry was empty and empty was lonely and feeling like he was going to explode because he was so full maybe meant that one day he would be that full of happiness, that full of love, that full of anything good. And it was just a mechanism to make himself feel better. 

So he climbed the hill, though it took a while, and followed Vic into a National Park where they then walked on a path for a bit where they then found a small bench right in front of a part in the trees where the Golden Gate Bridge and the entire bay was visible. Kellin sunk onto the bench with a loud sigh, and Vic sat on it gently with the biggest smile blooming smile on his face. The night was cold but Kellin was sweating and hot, and the pressing tears behind his eyes weren't leaving. Vic crossed his legs and laughed a bit as he watched the sky. The gap in the trees that allowed them to view the sky was oddly expansive, and Kellin twisted his hands together as they sat and watched.

The air was cold, and Vic let it sink into his skin, raise goosebumps and gently tease with his hair. It was hard to see stars in the city, but Vic could see them glowing up there, and there was no way that they couldn't be. Stars were dependable. Every day and every night they were up there, bright and solitary, alone from everyone else, miles away from others, abandoned up in space, somewhere so remote, so dark, but so magical, because everyone loves the stars. Everyone watches them and draws constellations out of them, everyone studies them, everyone depends on them for life because without some stars there would be no light, no food, no nothing. Why couldn't people be like stars?

Some were, of course, but some of the loneliest people didn't get the attention they deserved. They sat unnoticed in the sky, perhaps not burning as bright as some other stars but they were still there, they still existed. Yet they sat there as if they didn't exist, all alone in a big world where sometimes they needed to be noticed. Because even the smallest stars deserved to be looked at once in a while. They didn't need to be studied and talked about all the time, but they needed to feel like they existed. Everyone, stars or not, needed to feel like they existed once in a while.

:::::::

It was the next morning in which both Kellin and Vic realized that nothing good lasted forever. Well, maybe it was just Vic. He had made the executive decision not to go to class, which he told Kellin in a mumble through his pillow, because he was feeling the full effects of his breakup and absolutely none of the so called "magic" from the previous night.

Kellin wasn't exactly in a great state either, because he hadn't been able to weigh himself since August and it was November and he was slowly losing his mind because he wasn't sure if he had lost weight or gained weight or if anything had changed and he needed to because he just did and all of his self-doubt and hatred was fucking ripping him apart and he didn't know what to do.

So he went to class as if he wasn't about to have a breakdown, and avoided talking to people or doing any classwork which made him feel as though he'd be better off curled up under the blankets back in his room like Vic was.

It was only in P.E class when Kellin came to realize that maybe he really shouldn't have done anything that day. His body was still aching from walking what could equal to the entire length of San Francisco the previous night, and he hadn't eaten anything since throwing up his entire binge the night before, and he had a headache and he was feeling sort of hopeless and a tiny bit suicidal, which he wouldn't admit to himself.

Although he wasn't, at all, Kellin was working on trying to convince himself that he was recovering. From what, well, that was something he had to work out. From self harm, that was one thing. An eating disorder that he wouldn't own up to having. Wanting to kill himself. A suicide attempt. There. In recovery from a suicide attempt, among many other things.

But he wasn't lying to himself when sometimes he wondered, again, if he would be better off dead. And standing on the track while pretending to listen to what Jack was saying, he had somewhat convinced himself of it again.

They were about to run the mile.

There went the coach's whistle, there went Ryan and the athletes, there went the average kids, there went the slow kids, and there was Kellin, who hadn't even started running.

"Kellin." It was Jack, who was still standing next to him. "It's timed."

"Oh." And they started running. It took about five seconds for Jack to ditch Kellin, who was informed by the coach after his first lap that he had made it in five minutes. As he completed his third lap in the fantastic time of thirteen minutes, Kellin wasn't at all shocked to find that he was honestly about to give up because running the mile was one of the worst things in the world, especially if the teacher was just using it as a warm up. 

He felt as though he was breathing his air in through a stirring straw, and like his ribs had been doused in gasoline and lit on fire. The salty taste of blood in his mouth made him feel sick, his thighs stung from rubbing together, and his knees felt like they were going to give out at any second.

So he stopped running.

Their eyes were on him, all of them, the whole class was watching from the side of the track where they had finished. The coach was about to notice. And call his name.

"Kellin! You're almost done, come on!" He was not almost done. Someone was laughing. He felt as though he couldn't move, like his feet were cement blocks and his legs were nowhere near strong enough to lift them off the ground. He tried to step forward but then everything decided to give out, and then he heard footsteps.

He covered his face.

"Kellin." He couldn't see anyone, no one could see him. The five year old hide and seek tactic wasn't working at all but he had reached a level of embarrassment where it didn't matter anymore, yeah, that was Kellin, the fat kid who collapsed before he could finish running the mile and started to cry even though he wasn't fucking crying, damn, he didn't know who was sitting down on the track next to him but he felt like turning away, he felt like sinking through the track to the pits of hell, he felt like dying all over again and it took him a while to realize that it was an unjustified feeling that he didn't really feel, he wasn't allowed to feel suicidal anymore. It wasn't going to get him anywhere. Maybe if he jumped off a cliff. Shot himself in the head. Actually hit a vein in his arm this time because no, no, four huge fucking box cutter cuts down his arm had not gone down the main vein in his arm and he hadn't died- he wasn't even good enough to kill himself.

And he couldn't uncover his face. He couldn't own up to it, he couldn't face facts, and that was what he needed to do. Suppose he could start by seeing who was there. So he did.

It was Jack.

The next thing his eyes went to was the other side of the track, where the class wasn't standing and laughing at him. They were going back inside. Free time. The coach, however, was standing around at the edge of the fence that went around the track, talking to Ryan.

"Kellin." That was his name, him, that hadn't changed. Kellin would never change. Maybe everything else in the world would but his name wasn't going to, at least, that was one thing that would stay the same.

"Yes." Jack was sitting cross legged next to him, and was looking at his leg. It was bleeding. He had scraped it. They both watched the cherry red blood slowly make its way down onto the track that Ryan's feet moved over every morning.

"What happened?" Jack looked plain sad, and Kellin wondered why. He wondered how he looked.

"I can't run." His breath was all shuddery and he still couldn't even breathe much at all, and he wasn't crying but he wanted to and he just wanted to break down and he sort of hated Jack for no reason at all right then. "And I hate today, and I want to die." Jack's eyes were focused on the blood trickling down Kellin's leg.

"Why do you want to die?"

"Because I'm useless." Jack finally looked up, and when he did Kellin found that he didn't want to make eye contact.

"Except you're not." Someone yelled something, and Jack looked over his shoulder to see Ryan walking back up to the gym and the coach waving them over. Kellin followed Jack back across the field with his shoulders hunched, wondering if Jack would want to continue their conversation. Probably.

When they got back to the locker room, everyone was gone and the bell had rung and the day had ended. Kellin cleaned up the scrape on his knee and assured Jack that he wouldn't kill himself before he was stopped by the coach as they were trying to leave the locker room. Jack was instructed to leave, which immediately set Kellin off and freaked him out a decent amount. And then he had to go into the coach's office, room, whatever it was, and sit down and he was so anxious that the coach would shut the door, except he didn't.

He just sat down and said-

"I'm going to make you an offer that you're the first person to have ever received." This was going to be interesting.

"Okay."

"I'll give you the rest of this quarter and the third one off under one condition." This was interesting. Kellin would do absolutely anything he could to get out of P.E, and hoped that this "condition" wouldn't be anything too out of the question.

"You've got to spend this block with the counselor. Instead of gym, you'll work with her to get things... worked out. You're not the only kid I've had with bad physical health but I think you'd be better off improving your mental health." That was true, probably, maybe not wanting to die came before having breakdowns because of running the mile, or maybe losing the weight should come before wanting to die. Maybe losing weight would stop him from wanting to die.

"Okay."

"So..." The offer hung in the air and of course he was going to take it, but he felt as though he might have been helping himself somehow. Even if it was by making himself even more insecure by wearing a too-small uniform and doing things that were extremely physically demanding for him, he felt like he was getting somewhere.

"Yeah. I'll do it." The coach nodded and folded and then unfolded his arms.

"Okay." It was awkward, and Kellin got up to walk out. There was a scale in the corner and he glanced at it before leaving the room. For some reason, he walked away from it.


	12. Feels Like Coming Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> named after feels like coming home by jetta. its a good song?? idk how i found it??

It was the week of Thanksgiving. Which meant no school. Which was good and bad at the same time, because sometimes a distraction from stressful work was much needed, but sometimes too much free time was taken with that measure, which wasn't always a good thing.

Vic Fuentes took his free time to think about finding his way back to Under the Sun. Like the rest of his old friends, he had enjoyed spending time at the record store, doing work there, getting advice from actual adults, and honestly just hanging out and enjoying himself. Being there hadn't been bad but everything else had and along with cutting all of his friends out of his life, Under the Sun had got to go too, of course, because anything that he enjoyed obviously was going to do some sort of harm to Jaime in the long run. Vic had stopped questioning it in the end because the more he questioned, the tighter Jaime's grip on him became. Giving up had never been easier.

Over the course of the past three days, Kellin had spoken less and less about anything at all and had just done his work for the break while Vic lay around and stalked his old friends' social media accounts. It was when he had seen too many happy photos of people he hadn't been able to laugh with in too long, he decided to talk to Kellin about them.

"Have you been to Under the Sun?" If he was friends with Jack, which he was, then he must have been because Gee always liked meeting new people and there was no way that she wasn't going to get to meet the new kids and Kellin was new and he just, god, Vic missed all of them so badly.

"Yeah." Kellin was sitting on his couch, it had sort of been designated as his own at this point because Vic was fairly certain that he hadn't so much as touched his bed since he had arrived there, and was attempting to complete a chemistry review sheet that he was obviously clueless about.

"All the same people are there? Gee and Frank and Patrick and-"

"Pete. Yeah." It wasn't like Kellin had wanted to make enthusiastic conversation before, but at least he had tried. Before, there had been something in his voice, and he had been all nervous and shaky and now it was just like there was just nothing.

"I'm going to go there." Vic announced, as if Kellin actually cared, which he might've if he knew why it was that important to Vic, or if he even felt like being alive and having enough energy to participate in a conversation.

"Great." Of course. Vic was hesitantly debating voicing the "did something happen?" question that he wasn't going to get a direct answer to, but things seemed sort of awkward after they had gone through their little Q&A session which neither of them had enjoyed and then again Vic kept looking too long at Kellin and focusing on his features and just thinking about him and jesus he had just spent the past few days crying over the relationship that he had just gotten out of and there was no way that he could like Kellin in that way.

No way.

After only the smallest amount of debating within his own mind, Vic settled on not asking Kellin exactly what he had been planning to. Instead, he just left. It seemed easier that way.

Outside, the weather was the San Francisco usual, grey and chilly. None of that mattered to Vic, the only thing he could think of was that he got to go back to Under the Sun, and that was really all that mattered. Indulging in viewing the outside of the store at sometime around midnight a few nights ago had been exciting, but definitely nowhere near as exciting as actually going inside and talking to the people that whose company he enjoyed almost more than anyone's.

The walk was the same as it had always been, Vic's feet dashed across the same crosswalks as they had before, waited at the same traffic lights, did all the same things but had such different things on his mind. It was odd, how he had never gone to Under the Sun in pain. Yes, sometimes he had shown up all teary eyed and sad about things in the past that had happened but he had never gone showing recent bruises on his face, had never gone there while he had been dating Jaime. And he knew that they knew why he had stopped coming, why he had stopped spending his Friday nights playing board games at the shop, why he had stopped showing up at odd times like the rest of them did asking for advice on random things, they all knew.

And then he was there.

Nothing had changed. A new sort of fear that he hadn't been expecting was beginning to take hold of him because oh god, how was everyone going to react? Frank wasn't there, and Frank had always liked him the most, so it probably wouldn't be as bad unless Frank was there but peering through the window in a way so the people inside couldn't see him, all Vic could see was random customers, Gee, and Patrick. Vic didn't want Gee to scream. That would be a bad thing. He knew that she probably would, and could easily imagine the look on her face and Patrick, well, he would probably just grin in that way that he did and wouldn't really know what to do because he was awkward and they were all awkward and so much nostalgia was hitting him and the door still squeaked when he opened it and speaking of squeaking-

Gee screamed.

So loudly, in fact, that Patrick dropped a whole stack of CDs on the ground and the majority of the people hanging around the shop looked up and glared at her with the sort of expressions that only rude people who didn't realize that she was an employee wore.

"Vic!" She squealed, throwing herself at him like they were magnets whose cold surfaces touched regardless of how much their other sides wanted to run as far away from each other as they could. His first instinct was to flinch back when she pulled him up against her, but instead he just held his breath and reminded himself that Gee Way would never do a damn thing to hurt him. Gee was taller than him, and he let himself melt into the hug because it was a damn good one.

It was the sort of one where he could feel her heartbeat and her warm breath, he could smell the weird perfume that Frank had probably bought her and he could smell the toothpaste on her breath. All of the tension that she probably hadn't even noticed in her body all fell away, and she spun a little bit, rocking back and forth on her heels and pulling him forward, it was like a reunion at the end of cheesy fucking movies except they were standing in a shitty record store and Vic was slowly but surely suffocating.

Gee pulled away and brushed her faded red hair back from her face. Nothing had changed about that either, she had been dying her hair the same color and it was still about shoulder length with painfully split ends. It felt like nothing had changed and it felt like the whole world had changed; Vic had felt like he had returned to a home he had been kicked out of and all in all, he felt like everything was just really, really bright.

And good. Bright and good and happy, like their Christmas lights had suddenly gone and exploded, like the sun had decided that clouds were for losers and shone as bright as it possibly could, like Gee's smile was the thing lighting up the entire world; the whole place felt so alive and Vic felt like this had been the thing that he had to do. He had done it. He had made it there, he wasn't even scared, his heart was beating blood around his veins and he was taking in oxygen and breathing out carbon dioxide; Gee was there and she was absolutely his main priority.

And of course, he was hers.

Prioritizing people often leads to doing what you are not supposed to, and Gee had decided in a short amount of time that Vic was more important than her job, which then lead to her dragging him into the back room while Patrick watched them, realizing that he was going to get to finish off the day all by himself.

Gee had turned her back on Vic once they reached the back room, and he stood nervously, wondering what she would say first to him. Turns out, it wasn't as impressive as he had been expecting.

"Fuck." She said. Her voice had changed. Maybe she had finally gotten proper hormones, and he would have tried to casually ask if he wasn't just a little scared of what she was going to say or how she was going to react because the blur of immediate happiness of seeing him had died down and faded into something else. Finally, she turned around, and Vic was absolutely terrified to see tears in her eyes.

"Hey. Hey, hey, hey-"

"No. I-" She seemed at a loss for words, which was new, and she seemed all shaky and confused about things, which made perfect sense but she didn't have to cry and Vic would repeat possibly comforting "heys" over and over and over again even if they wouldn't do anything because after all this time, he had been reduced to using the word "hey" as a form of comfort because, well, he didn't even know it just felt comforting but Gee Way was an adult who didn't need a high school kid who was fucking with her emotions saying "hey" to her and just, maybe it was better for Vic to stay silent. It was awkward that way but sometimes it was more awkward when he said the wrong thing, like repeating "hey" over and over and over again.

"I was so scared," she finally said, sighing. "You have no idea. Because Alex kept- he, fuck, he didn't know what was happening and everyone kept asking him and he kept saying shit about Jaime and we all thought, we, we didn't even know anything and you just stopped. Stopped coming. So we all jumped to conclusions and Alex was falling apart so Jack just told us that Jaime wouldn't let you do anything anymore so we just- we just kept worrying. And here you are." Her tears were actually on her face now, and she rubbed at her eyes with surprising disregard for the makeup that she had always bragged about working so hard on. That had changed, too. Her eyeliner looked sharper.

"I broke up with him." Vic said quietly, not giving any of what she said a proper reply because, honestly, there was no real way to reply to a small speech like that.

"You did?" She asked, her voice wobbly and breaking.

"Yeah." Her eyes hadn't changed, though, they were still hazel and bright and hopeful, and she directed her gaze at him with that same hopeful look on her face and then-

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." She hugged him again and he didn't flinch away this time, but she started crying again and Vic was wondering why he wasn't feeling all of the emotions that Gee was. When she pulled back and he saw her eye makeup all runny and smeared he almost started off with a "hey" but then she said-

"I'm sorry, I always. I feel like I have to protect you guys. To help you guys. Like I'm an honorary mom. And there was nothing I could do to help you and you had gotten so distant in the end and I could have done something and I felt like a failure because I didn't do anything, and- and fuck-"

"Gee, Gee you're not a failure for not doing anything. It's not your job to take care of me, it's my job to take care of me and maybe I didn't do that enough-"

"No-oh, no way!" She said, her voice getting a bit louder and her tears lessening a bit, she wasn't getting angry at Vic but she was getting angry for him blaming himself except that she was blaming herself for what had happened to him and now it was almost comical, so Vic laughed. And she stopped when he laughed.

"What?" She demanded, smiling in a confused way just because he was laughing. "What?" She said again, all of the fight draining out of her voice and demeanor.

"I'm here, and the first thing we do is cry and scream at each other." Vic's giggling was escalating into something more than giggling and Gee stared at him, and the look on her face was so funny and his laughter got to her because it was so good and happy and she had wanted to hear it for so long, she had missed him so much, and then she started laughing because laughter was fucking contagious and the sad tears turned back into happy tears and Vic and his presence had done a fantastic job of ruining Gee's makeup but there were much worse things that could have happened that day.

:::::::

"We've been invited to a thing." Vic was back in his own room and was surprised at how ungodly domestic it sounded when he voiced the invitation like that.

"A thing?" Kellin asked. Throughout the whole time that Vic had been gone, which was about all day, Kellin hadn't moved and had instead spent his day staring at the wall and thinking lots and lots of self deprecating thoughts about how he really didn't deserve anything at all and would be very better off dead. Clearly, he had had a worse day than Vic.

"A Thanksgiving thing. At Pete and Patrick's place." The Thanksgiving thing had always taken place at Pete and Patrick's place because Pete knew how to cook and Patrick could bake and their apartment was slightly better than Gee and Frank's, it was actually much better and bigger but no one ever said it, and Vic had always loved it. They cooked for the high schoolers and their own friends, people who didn't have families to go visit over break, and it would be warm and it always made Vic feel as though he was loved.

"Huh." Kellin said. He seemed out of it, for lack of better words, and had slowly moved his gaze from the wall to the floor over the course of the day.

"You'll come with me, right? I don't want to go alone. And they want you there, too." It had reached a point where Vic wasn't even sure if any of his words were registering with Kellin. But he wasn't going to start with the "heys" just yet because he had had a really good day and if Kellin wanted to stare at the floor for the rest of the night then Vic sure was going to leave him to it.

Except after almost an hour of extremely awkward silence in which Vic tried to do some writing but was too distracted by the fact that Kellin hadn't blinked in like, ten minutes, and Vic didn't know what to do. So he didn't do anything. Sometimes it was better not to subject himself to another awkward conversation and maybe it was better when he was all sad and beaten down and Kellin was upset and had just binged so maybe Vic should just wait for those exact certain times to talk to him. Yet, but, just- it was weird. It was just that every five minutes Vic's eyes flew back to Kellin and not just to see if he had passed out or anything, he was just pretty. And Vic sort of wanted his attention in the weird way that people wanted attention from their crushes but sort of lost their minds whenever they got it, no, nope, Vic was not crushing on Kellin. He just liked how Kellin was. It was possible to like how someone was without liking them more than that.

And so they sat in silence for a good long while before Vic made the possibly terrible decision to speak.

"Are you alright?" A valid question, for once, and it was asked because Kellin looked like he was about to burst into tears at any second and it was so obvious that he was hurting so much and all Vic wanted to do was help him in some way. Kellin debated his answer within his head for a while before he finally replied.

"I'm. Hungry." His voice was so quiet. It seemed like a problem that was extremely easy to solve, so Vic just sat there stupidly.

"Then... eat?" Everything seemed to hang in the air like suspended objects frozen right before they hit the ground and broke, and then, just-

"I can't." The atmosphere was so heavy that Vic physically felt weighed down, and waited for Kellin's next choked words so he could have some idea of what was going on. "Because I'll look worse if I do." The break in his voice and the way he turned his head gave Vic the idea that maybe Kellin was freaking out and that made sense, it all made sense, but, fuck, it wasn't fair.

"Oh man, no, that's not the way to think." Vic moved across the room like a ghost, sitting down on the other side of the couch with his eyes all big and stupid and concerned. "Eating isn't gonna make you look bad. Not eating will do much more damage." Kellin shook his head and turned it away from Vic's face, pulling his hands up to twist in his hair.

"I can't, I-fuck- I can't eat anything without wanting to eat more and somehow there's always more somewhere, and-and, and I've got no fucking self control and I hate, I-I-I-" It was that moment when Vic realized that he was going to start with the "heys."

"Hey, hey, come on. If it's any consolation, I think that you're very pretty. That's the first thing I thought when I met you. That you're pretty." Kellin's hand was over his face, his fingertips brushing against his hair, and yes, he was really freaking out and all Vic had to say was that he was pretty.

"My body isn't pretty. I, that's-" He broke off because oh my god he was smiling, and had turned his head even farther away but Vic saw his eyes crinkle a bit and his cheeks got all round and smiley and then- "shut up," he muttered, sniffing and wiping at his face.

"Very pretty, yeah. A supermodel body. That hair, such a nice dark brown, like mahogany. You could tape it to a desk and no one could tell the difference. And those eyes, wow, like the ocean had been condensed into a marble. You could melt those eyes into the marble floor at a fancy hotel and everyone would be ashamed to step on it. That skin, clear and smooth, like... porcelain. Like that David Bowie song, right? China Doll?" 

Kellin had shifted around so he was finally facing Vic again but was leaning back against the arm of the couch. The thing about Kellin was that he would have been perfect. With all of his features, so sharp and unique and fucking stunning, but then there was everything that society had come to think was so utterly despicable; fat. It was so odd how beauty standards had narrowed their way down to anorexic models and guys who looked like their abs had gotten that way by being rolled over by monster trucks. It was completely unrealistic and made everyone who didn't look that way feel shit, especially people who were even farther away from what people these days considered beautiful.

Vic had never been conditioned to that. He was gay, he found a fat guy beautiful, there must be something wrong with him. Vic had always been open minded, he had always tried to be fair and kind to everyone, damn, he never wanted to be self-centered but it really fucking hurt sometimes that he never got back the treatment that he gave to others. 

"It's China Girl," Kellin mumbled.

"What?"

"The David Bowie song. It's China Girl."

:::::::

"I'll come but I won't want to eat anything." It was the next morning after neither Vic and Kellin had slept after spending a lot of time talking about musical artists who had died and their influences and how much life sucked and how Kellin really wasn't as gross as he made himself out to be. They had gone and gotten healthy food at some point in the night, which Kellin had had a hard time eating in front of Vic but had finally gotten it down simply because he was really hungry and, in his own words, had "no fucking self control," but there was nothing else to eat after that and he had been kind of uncomfortable because he wasn't used to eating just a thing and then continuing on with his life, no, eating had always been a big deal.

Thanksgiving had always been a perfect excuse to binge, and he was absolutely terrified of going somewhere where they would be lots of food and the main focus would be all the food and just- it wasn't his idea of a good time.

Vic was nervous because he was going to spend the day with all of these people that he hadn't spoken to in years and was about to get more hugs than he could deal with and he was most certainly going to flinch away and get all the pity looks and Kellin was nervous because he was going to spend the day with all of these people that judged him and would watch him eat and take notice of the stupid, little things like that and would probably maybe get a pity look because that was him, the fat kid who was too afraid to eat in front of other people.

"Can I have a practice hug?" Vic asked, looking just a little embarrassed. Kellin didn't even answer, and just hugged him. That was something, Vic realized, while in Kellin's arms. He gave really good hugs.


	13. Family Name

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> named after family name by trophy eyes. good fucking band (and song.) some stuff about dysphoria / dysmorphia here.

There is always a point in a party where you have ended up sat somewhere by yourself, maybe looking at your phone or maybe picking at the chips you picked up from the table that got shitty crumbs on your pants that weren't even good. Although he said that he wouldn't, Vic had gone and abandoned Kellin as soon as everyone had gone around and said how thankful they were for everything and then it had been like someone had yelled "hike" at a football game and everyone had broken to go get food or talk to someone. So Vic had been whisked away by all of his anxious fans while Kellin had been left sitting in a chair in the corner of the room with a plate full of food that he didn't want to throw away and didn't want to eat.

The sad thing was, he really wanted to eat it. In the end, he did. And then he had been dragged into a conversation with Ryan and Patrick so then he had eaten more when Ryan had gotten food and then Ryan had left him for a bit so he had just sat back where he had been before and ate and watched. In all honesty, he was acting stupid and could interact with people if he wanted to because even if he did have anxiety, it wasn't a major social thing with people he knew and no one was paying attention to him anyways, so that was that and he was probably just acting stupid. It didn't help that Jack and Alex had hightailed it back to Baltimore as soon as break started, because Kellin was getting the feeling that at least Jack would have tried to talk to him.

In the end, it was Tay Jardine that saved him. He saw her but didn't, really, whenever he got to properly thinking his eyes always focused on everything but didn't process what was happening, so mechanically ate and stared into space while Tay approached him. Hearing his name snapped him out of his daze, and he blinked and focused on Tay's worried looking face.

"Hey." She said.

"Hey." He echoed.

"Want to get out of here?" She asked.

"Yeah."

\-------

Tay had found Ryan somewhere along the way to the little balcony that Patrick and Pete were very lucky to have, and had told Kellin that Ryan was drunk except that Ryan was not drunk and didn't drink and probably wouldn't ever and Kellin knew what drunk looked like and smelled like and Ryan wasn't drunk, not at all, they were just high.

"How much did you smoke?" Kellin asked once they were all sat down safely on the balcony with not much risk of falling through or under the barrier to the dark street below.

"One. Blunt. I'm fine. Frank brought so much fucking weed that they're all going to die if they smoke it all. They are as fried as chicken." Ryan answered, looking at the hazy sky. "I feel terrible, though. Can we get serious?" They asked, swallowing hard.

"Yeah," Tay answered, drawing her knees up to her chest. No one ever protested to getting serious because everyone always had something to say that they wouldn't be brave enough to bring up otherwise. 

"So." Ryan began, and they fell silent, waiting for her next words. "I feel fat and stupid and I hate my body and I don't know what to do." Kellin nodded and smiled a little, which caused Ryan to take on a look of real anger.

"Sorry?" They demanded, glaring at Kellin with a sort of weird annoyance that was coming from absolutely nowhere.

"If you want advice on how to not be fat and stupid, don't ask me." He tried to smile a bit after that to make a sort of light of it because if there were two words that he felt were accurate, if vague, descriptions of him, they were fat and stupid. And Ryan wasn't fat or stupid, they were just dysphoric. And Kellin wasn't stupid, he just thought that being fat made him stupid but the only reason he had the excuse to feel stupid was because his grades were quite poor because he hadn't finished the previous grade, that was why.

Ryan was being mean and Kellin was being equally as defensive so Tay was left to stare at them with her back pressed against the bars of the barrier that kept the balcony actually a balcony, wondering how it would feel to fall off of it.

"Oh, sorry, didn't mean to upset you," Ryan spat, their voice turning into this terrible, poisonous thing, their face glaring and angry and ready for any kind of altercation. "Here, maybe, this. I want to cut off my boobs. I want to take a knife and just cut right fully across my chest. Get rid of everything. Tay, you're a female, how often do you feel like you want to cut about half of your torso off?" Ryan demanded, dragging the last person who wanted to fight into the argument.

"I-" Tay said, looking petrified.

"Are you kidding me?" Exclaimed Kellin, staring at Ryan. "I'm a guy and I have tits, you know, at least your body is right." His words were backed up with so much hatred and emotion that Tay could physically feel how much he just wanted his body to be "right."

"Except I don't want this body!" Shrieked Ryan, going crazy with the hand gestures. "All of your problems are because you're fucking fat, at-fucking-least you can do something about it! I can't do anything! I don't want to be a girl but there's nothing else to be!" Tay was really caught in a full on angst battle, and was looking back and forth between her friends as though she was watching a ping-pong match.

"Well I can't-" He broke off and Tay was giving him warning looks that he finally caught because in that situation, he was probably the second most sane one so whatever words had been hovering in the back of his mind were soon dismissed because Tay looked terrified and Ryan was going to jump on anything he said just like-

"Oh, no, please keep going. Tell me all about your gender identity issues." Ryan was spitting daggers of hostility any time they spoke, and Kellin was so surprised because they never acted like this. They were always calm and cool, so maybe this was them trying to get something out but if that's what getting things off your chest felt like then maybe Kellin would want to keep everything to himself for as long as he could.

"Never mind." He said, because there were no gender identity issues. He just couldn't be a man. It's not that that was all he wanted in life, but crying wasn't for boys and feeling wasn't for guys and getting raped wasn't for men so he would just have to settle for "pussy" and move on.

"Right, because you don't have that problem." No, no he didn't.

"No, I don't."

:::::::

Gee Way took her time when she did her makeup. On days when she didn't have work and was planning on going out, now, then she really took her time. Her appearance and the way she was viewed was perhaps overly important to her but even though she passed so well, (Frank's words) sometimes she didn't always believe it so putting on more makeup and contouring her jaw to the extreme was sometimes a helpful way to get past the fear of not passing.

So she played her own music loudly on Frank's record player, although their tastes weren't so different in the end, and did her makeup while her lovely boyfriend ate cereal and shouted encouragements from different places in the house as he cleaned up and reorganized.

And then Ryan showed up at the door, skin blotchy, eyes red, and very, very upset. Frank let them in because Gee was otherwise occupied with her makeup. There were few things that stopped Gee from doing her makeup and one of them was Ryan Ross when upset.

Frank was awkward and really bad at comforting people, well, the only person he was good at taking care of was Gee but that was because he had spent years holding her while she cried when everything just got to be too much. And he became a terrible mumbling mess when Ryan showed up at the door of their apartment already in tears, and he was surprised and wasn't sure what to do and they didn't want to be rude but they really needed to talk to Gee because Gee was the solution to everything and in the end Ryan ended up sobbing on Gee's bed, the ace bandages digging so hard into their chest that they couldn't breathe, really, at all, and it was all a major mess that needed fixing.

"What's wrong? Ryan, please, please, just-" Gee was fluttering around her friend, with her makeup half done, hair still messy and tangled from not being brushed yet, needing any sort of sign from Ryan because it was obvious that there was some sort of physical pain happening, it was just that Gee wasn't magic, only to some, but she couldn't tell what made everyone or anyone sad. In the end, Ryan resulted to grabbing at their chest, at the bandages, and Gee was instructing them to take their shirt off and oh no that wasn't happening because dysphoria had become more and more controlling and there was no way Ryan was going to take their shirt off and fuck, both of them were freaking out and only one of them felt like they could do anything about it.

"The more you cry and the move you move the more and the more you move the more it's going to hurt so please, please take off your shirt Ryan, please. I'll give you a sports bra and we'll get you a proper binder and, Ryan-" Gee was getting panicky and Ryan was ripping off their shirt and Gee was getting up, going to her dresser drawer, it took so little for everything to be fixed.

"Take it off, take it off, that's going to break your fucking ribs." Gee said, throwing a sports bra at Ryan and promptly turning around as to prove that she wasn't going to see anything that Ryan was insecure about. So the bandages were finally unwound from Ryan's chest and they slid the bra on right away which brought more tension back but it was so much less than before and Gee was taking the bandages out of their hand, no, she didn't take them, she ripped them and it was that little act that brought Ryan back into a fresh state of tears.

This time, Gee was actually and truly confused as to what she had done.

"Ryan, please, can't you tell me what's wrong?" Gee sat down on the bed next to Ryan and gave them the stupid puppy eyes that always somehow got Ryan to do what she wanted.

"I feel so-so shit! I'm so confused about, about me- I've got no idea what I am or what I want to be and I hate my body and I, fuck, I was an absolute dick to Kellin last night and I need, shit, I need to go apologize and all I can do is, I- fuck fuck fuck-"

"Slow down." Said Gee, wanting all the cursing to stop because she did curse a fair amount but when it all got caught up between hasty breaths and tears, all Gee heard was one big "FUCK" which was never good when she was trying to help someone out. "One problem at a time, okay? Where do you want to start?" Ryan breathed and ran their hand along the neck of their shirt.

"Gender. Stupid, stupid gender. What am I?" They asked.

"I thought- I don't know. What do you feel like?" Gee, as a somewhat famous tumblr blogger with a less than famous YouTube channel that she actually posted on, knew everything there was to know about gender and sexuality and all the fun stuff that was associated with annoying ass social justice warriors that everyone made fun of. Gee wasn't one of those, she was just a trans girl who respected people's pronouns, preached that pansexuality was a thing, and believed that there definitely not any more than five genders and anyone who said anything else was just a little too far gone. 

"I feel like nothing." It sounded cryptic that way, but Ryan might have felt slightly emotionally numb at perhaps four in the morning when they had been wearing their makeshift binder for over twenty four hours but their emotions sure had come back and they were feeling the full force of them at that exact moment. "Like I'm not a girl or a guy and it really sucks, does that have a real name?" Their tone was hopeful and Gee was just glad that they weren't trans, as bad as it sounded.

"Agender. It's a lack of gender and yes, it's a real thing.. Cool?"

"Cool." That was a relief to Ryan, knowing that they actually had a name for what they were feeling. And of course, they had looked up the "symptoms" that they were feeling but there had been too many results to actually pick anything out.

"Next?" Gee asked.

"Binder?" Ryan asked hopefully. It was almost a hilarious situation because Gee felt like such a mom. And she was absolutely loving it and would do nothing to complain so she kept the smile on her face and said-

"Oh, yeah. We'll get you one. But rules." Ryan sighed in the way that only someone who had heard Gee's rules before sighed. Gee liked rules. They set things up and kept things in order and usually prevented everything from falling apart because everyone thought that rules sucked and wanted to be all punk and shit but rules were the only thing keeping the whole damn world together so Gee liked adhering to them and coming up with her own ones in certain situations.

"You wear it for eight hours a day and if you wear it for any more I will burn it. No more binders for you. You do not fucking run it it. No way." Ryan didn't protest at that, and just shrugged. "Understood?"

"Yes." Maybe the running wouldn't be an issue.

"And please take it off in P.E and at night, okay?"

"Yeah." So they were left in silence, which was never something that Gee was a fan of, so she kept going.

"I know dysphoria sucks, you know that. But you're alright. You've got a good body. You're fine. You're cool." It was just a mess of bad compliments but Ryan smiled in that way that they just did.

"Sure."

"What's our last problem?" Ryan's happy expression sort of just dropped and they winced a bit.

"Kellin is the last problem. Last night I got kind of high, not that it's any sort of excuse, so we were all out on your balcony and we were getting serious and Kellin and I ended up arguing about gender and something's wrong, with him, not that something's wrong but something happened and I told him that all of his problems were there because he was fat and then, fuck, I was a bitch."

"Huh." Gee rubbed her finger around her lip, smearing the lip liner that she had gotten on but just hadn't reached the lipstick. "Talk to him. Seriously. Don't fight, just talk."

"Yeah, I'm gonna."

"Good." They looked at each other, and smiled.

"Want some cereal?"

:::::::

Kellin was looking for Ryan because all great minds think alike and he really had to talk to them and Ryan really had to talk to him but it was all about different things and it was all perfectly alright.

They ran into each other right in the middle of where their rooms were, both distracted enough not to realize that each other were there until they were sidestepping each other and properly focusing in on the world.

"Hi!" Said Ryan too loudly with their eyes too bright and too many ideas going through their head. It was cold, and Ryan was wearing short sleeves because Lynn was being a bitch and had basically driven Ryan out of their room because Lynn was trying to record a cover and apparently couldn't do anything with Ryan sitting there. It was the sort of cold that threatened snow but didn't promise it, the kind that wove its way down your throat, turned your ears and the tip of your nose all red, the kind that curled out of your mouth in big clouds of warm air from in you that felt all too much like summer when stars shone brighter and the air was more welcoming.

"Hey." Kellin was sort of hesitant because he was just, allowed to be, and they stared at each other for a while while Ryan rubbed at their bare arms and shivered out dragon breaths into the air.

"Can you cut my hair?" They asked.

So they walked back to Kellin's room together where Vic was not, because it always seemed so convenient for roommates not to be around at the right times. It shouldn't have been the biggest deal but it was pretty exciting for Ryan to finally cut their hair because they couldn't really be viewed as anyone other than a girl with long hair. And their hair couldn't be their protection anymore because hiding their face wasn't going to get them anywhere anymore, so Ryan asked for a hoodie because it was so cold and Kellin gave them one, which was pretty absolutely great, because it was really big and soft and gave Ryan super sweaterpaws and smelled nice. They wished that Brendon would have nice big hoodies to give to them. But all he had to give was sly smiles that gave away nothing and frustrated Ryan more than they would like to admit.

After they told Kellin the vague idea of what they wanted, they were sat with their head over a trash can while Kellin debated how to cut their hair without majorly fucking up. It had been sort of quiet since they had gotten there and Kellin had had another bad day and it hadn't been super particularly bad, he just hadn't done much at all and hadn't left the couch all day and had held a very mediocre conversation with Vic who had split to go hang out with someone better halfway through the day and Kellin hadn't eaten anything all day so he ended up feeling sort of shitty, headachey, and desperate for human interaction.

"Close your eyes. I want it to be a surprise." Kellin said, because make it'd make it less of a terrible blow for Ryan not to watch Kellin messily chop their hair off and to just be greeted with an only somewhat terrible final product.

"Fine." So Ryan closed their eyes and Kellin started cutting, using ordinary scissors that were obviously not meant for cutting hair. "I'm sorry about last night," they added after that.

"I am too." The scissors snipped and Ryan felt terrified but sort of free at the same time, and tilted their head farther back.

"You shouldn't be sorry, as I started all of it-"

"Yeah, but I kept it going and shouldn't have even-"

"Yes but we don't need to figure out who was wrong. Maybe, then, are you alright?" All of the interrupting wasn't a huge issue because Ryan had essentially just burned the bush that they were beating around down and now Kellin was silent for maybe multiple reasons. And the scissors cut again.

"I guess so. Are you?" I guess so wasn't a proper answer but Ryan bit their tongue before saying that because they didn't need a repeat of the previous night.

"Yeah. I went and talked to Gee and she said that if I'm anything, it's agender. A lack of gender. It feels good to have a name for it, I think. I think it might feel right." Kellin watched Ryan smile because they didn't think he was watching and just felt so relieved that they had figured something out.

"That's really good." He sounded serious about it and though his words might not have conveyed it, his voice did and maybe he would have been smiling if Ryan could open their eyes and look. The scissors snipped some more.

"I think I have an eating disorder." He said it with this fairly casual tone, with nothing choked behind his voice and nothing weird or shaky or stuttery, his teeth not getting in the way of his tongue, nothing stopping it.

"Oh." He cut more and Ryan didn't say anything because they didn't know what there was to say. "Which...?" Their voice trailed into the cracks of the tile and the wires of the lightbulb and Kellin pulled at their hair before cutting more of it.

"Binge."

"Oh." Ryan heard Kellin breathing and that odd sound of half burnt out flickering lights and the scissors. Always snipping. "Are you- are you good?" Kellin kicked at the trash can.

"I'm trying to deal with it but I've got no idea what to do except just not to eat and that's another thing, I guess, guys don't get eating disorders." Maybe now he was sounding less confident in his words and he cleared his throat.

"Except they do." Ryan said.

"Yeah, well. Are you sure you want bangs?"

"Yeah." So there was more snipping and Ryan pulled at the sleeves of Kellin's hoodie. He was wearing short sleeves and before Ryan had been instructed to close their eyes, they had noticed how there the scars on his arm looked, how sharp and rough and in person.

They lapsed into silence again, one that wasn't awkward but wasn't exactly comfortable. Neither of them were waiting for each other to say anything, they were both too busy thinking about what they would say to each other, how to diffuse the air with words but still maintain dignity with; nothing came. It was quiet as Kellin kept cutting away, moving around Ryan's head, tugging at their hair and running the scissors along random strands. Finally-

"I think I've finished." Ryan opened their eyes right away and spun around to look at themself in the mirror and actually gasped because Kellin had done it right. It was short, much much shorter and ended off down by their ears but there were proper emo-y bangs that actually didn't look too emo and it was cut right, a bit shorter on the sides but didn't look too long, it looked good and Ryan turned to Kellin with their hands over their mouth.

"You did a job." Kellin grinned, the first real smile Ryan was sure that they had ever seen on him, and smiled right back. "Good. A good job. Thank you."

"You're welcome."


	14. Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> named after me by the 1975. mmm what a song. there's death in here (not really major,) mention of suicide, and brief mention of rape.

Maybe it was because Brendon was giving them a tattoo and it was sort of odd because they had always thought that their pain tolerance was oh so high but apparently they had been wrong the whole time and breaking their foot in P.E class in fourth grade just wasn't the same type of pain as getting a needle jabbed into their skin for the sake of art.

Well, Brendon had drawn a sun on his thigh in pen and asked Ryan just to go over it with a needle. They had, and had done a spectacularly bad job. The sun looked all wobbly and trippy and the ink was thicker in some parts than others but Brendon had still smiled when they had finished and then told them that he now had to do a moon for them. Sun and moon. Yin and yang. Right and wrong. So perhaps Ryan was weaker than Brendon when it came to tattoos and worse when it came to art, but as they winced every time the needle pushed harder into their skin, all they could think of was that they really did love Brendon.

Because Brendon had carried them around the school and acted as a crutch for the days after they had broken their foot in P.E class in fourth grade and had made a paper mache sort of cast for them that he had worked on all week after school and it didn't do shit but it was better than Ryan's father completely ignoring them and it was a clean break that healed properly after Brendon's older brother drove Ryan to the emergency room one night. And Brendon had bought them bath bombs on bad days and had let them use his trainers because Ryan's father wouldn't buy them anything anymore and Brendon stole his sister's pads for Ryan every month because their father wouldn't buy them any and sometimes he included chocolate. Brendon had always been there, Brendon had taken the bus into Vegas with them that night when Ryan was behind on photography work and posed for their pictures in front of those neon lights and had announced that everything in their life was completely fake on their dark ride back through the dusty desert

His house had always been open to Ryan, and every day that they saw him a little twisting feeling wormed its way into their stomach and it made sense that he was the sun and Ryan was the moon because he kept Ryan alive, kept Ryan happy, kept everything going. And Ryan was different, Ryan was colder, Ryan might have been sadder, but in the end they always worked together and fit together, they were perfect for each other and sometimes Ryan wanted to scream because Brendon didn't seem to understand it.

"Done." Brendon leaned back and wiped the needle with the paper towel he had been dotting at the tattoo with. It was small, of course it was, but it was much more even and prettier than Ryan's sorry excuse for a sun. All it was was a simple crescent moon but Ryan smiled immediately when they saw it properly, and poked at the raised skin. "Leave it. Needs to heal." Brendon said, putting his india ink and clean needles back into a cloth bag. Ryan wanted to say something, because they felt like it may be the right time and that they may be finally brave enough.

The shorter hair might have done it, the way Brendon had opened his door and smiled as soon as he had seen Ryan's new hair and how he had said, "it suits you" so casually, so nicely. The same way he had told them that of course he would use their pronouns because, "it shouldn't be a hard thing to do!" And everyone had the occasional slip up with them except for Jack and, well, Brendon, because they had gotten the practice of switching pronouns and names for when Gee had told them that she was trans. Maybe it was harder with "plural" pronouns and using the same name, because it had been so much easier for everyone to associate female pronouns with a name like Gee than a name like Gerard.

But there had been too many times in which Ryan had wanted to kiss Brendon, in which they wanted to say at least something about how they felt, but it always seemed like the wrong thing and it always seemed like it would ruin their friendship. If Brendon was good at anything, it was art and sending mixed messages. They had been friends for as long as Ryan could remember, and maybe it was in 5th grade when Brendon had tickled them to the point that both of them were rolling around on the ground and Brendon had ended up on top of Ryan, grinning and breathing hard. Or in 7th grade when Ryan had showed up in tears at Brendon's house and he had listened solemnly and had taken them up to the roof of the mall where they could barely make out the Vegas lights and had talked about life. Or freshman year when Brendon's date had gotten sick for homecoming so he had gone with Ryan and it had been such a fun night so they finally mustered their courage and said-

"I think I really have feelings for someone." Ryan missed the split second in which Brendon's face fell and his casual smile dropped and his eyebrows knitted together because in a second it had all gone and he was pushing away whatever doubtful feeling he had just been hit with, and then thought up a reply.

"Who?"

"I can't say." Too bad, because if Ryan could say then maybe things would be alright and Brendon wouldn't be feeling confused and his own sort of sad.

"Do you want to tell them?" He asked.

"I think so, but I don't want to ruin our friendship. I think it might not be the best thing to do. Because I don't know if he feels the same way about me and we're close so I don't think it'd make things awkward, but maybe it would if my feelings were only one way."

"Oh." Ryan avoided his eye contact as a way to not give anything away, as if one glance could tell him what he wanted to hear.

"So he's your friend then?"

"Yeah." Brendon racked his mind to think of all the male friends Ryan had and could only come up with three, and one wasn't really a friend and wasn't even a possibility.

"It's not Kellin, is it?" He asked, thinking about how weird that would be.

"No! No, not Kellin." Ryan laughed a bit and shook their head. "Imagine how weird that would be. I think he might like Vic, anyways."

"You think Kellin likes Vic?" Brendon demanded, trying to imagine that. Turns out, he could.

"As a matter of fact, I do. I think they'd be cute together." Then, quiet.

"Okay, okay, but who do you like?" Brendon asked, his voice taking on more energy again, almost desperate to know. "It must be Spencer then-"

"Shut up!" Ryan giggled, shoving him. "Spencer's gay. Why is everyone here gay?" Brendon ignored the question and moved closer to them, whatever eye contact they had been avoiding had been thrown away because Brendon had the nicest, richest eyes, and things felt too close to the edge.

"C'mon Ry, who?" And one monosyllable word mouthed out on Ryan's lips changed absolutely everything.

:::::::

It didn't snow in San Francisco, or it was a rare occurrence, and Kellin was sitting on the couch and wondering why he was missing home so badly. If there was one thing that he hadn't expected from moving down the coast, it was wanting to go home.

Not home of course, not directly back to his house because it couldn't count as a fucking home, but he wanted snow and rain and the roads of trees and the lonely feeling that didn't count here because there was no way you could feel truly alone in a city with a million bright lights that never even flickered with doubt of ever burning out.

At night back home, it had all been pitch black all of the time. Maybe it had been comforting sometimes but at others it had just been terrifying. Still, he missed his late night walks.

They were something he had grown used to doing to escape what was waiting for him back home and sometimes if he was gone long enough, nothing would happen when he got back. He would walk the main street down to the lake which was two miles both ways and became all untreated farther down and he would walk in the snow and think too much and lose himself, but, in the end, he had stopped. But the walks had been comforting, treading on the side of the highway surrounded by trees, treading in snow covered grass while it rained lightly over his head.

Walking anywhere in San Francisco got him somewhere, of course, but it would get him somewhere with people. There were always people there and the streets were too steep and he wanted dark green.

Dark green trees, dark green grass, the odd, almost alien shade that was cast over his hometown. He missed it and wanted it back because all the colors were just a bit too bright here and that wasn't too bad a thing it was just that sometimes he needed a little darkness again, not just in his head but in the world around him, so he took out his phone and squinted at the screen that was too bright and pulled up Jack's number but didn't do anything after that because he needed air.

Like, proper, cold air that came right after snow and he wanted water to run down his sleeves because there was snow in them and he wanted home but oh my god he didn't, so he texted Jack.

"Can we meet?" It was the casual three a.m text that came from people having a hard time with their life and were received by probably more mentally sound people who were always sort of quite willing to help.

"Yeah." The reply was unexpected and made Kellin feel sort of happy because seriously talking to Jack had begun to feel sort of alright, sort of okay, sort of acceptable and sort of like something he could get used to. With Tay, he felt like he couldn't bring up anything serious and for Ryan it was fine but that was it, it was just fine, but Jack was different. Jack knew what was up and Jack wasn't judgy, not at all, really, he was just kind and listened and replied when the time came and Kellin was outside wishing that it could get colder and looking forward to a late night conversation that would no doubt involve sad topics.

They met off the main path somewhere under a tree. They both sat, and Kellin saw how uncharacteristically tired Jack looked so they just sat for a bit and didn't ask about why they were both awake and checking their phones at that hour of the morning until Kellin finally did.

"Why are you up?" It wasn't cold enough outside and Jack could probably agree, coming from Baltimore, they were both used to freezing winters and had both grown used to real pain in the winter times because it got so damn cold.

"I don't know. Alex was sad, so I talked to him. And then he fell asleep but I didn't." Jack seemed like a good boyfriend and Kellin was in no way gay, but it was something that just came to his mind. Jack and Alex had a fairly standard relationship that wasn't all that special, just two boys who really adored each other and lay awake at night thinking irrational thoughts of how they might not get to spend all of their lives with each other.

"Are you sad?" Kellin asked, because sometimes comforting other sad people could make you sad after they felt better. Not that Kellin had spent too much time helping people out, but knew the feeling. 

"Kind of. I guess. Old memories keep coming back, and I sort of miss home a lot. And I didn't want to wake up Alex because he had had a hard night so I wanted to let him sleep and it's unjustified to feel this way because there's nothing to feel sad about yet, yet- I do." Jack shook his head and messed with his hair, that seemed to be his go-to thing to do when he was nervous.

"I know how you feel." Jack ripped some grass out of the ground and picked it apart with his fingers. "Do you ever just feel really guilty?" It was random question time and they were bound to get into the heavy stuff sometime around then so Jack answered-

"Yeah."

"For what?" It almost sounded too invasive but Jack didn't seem to mind.

"It's not something that, I don't know, it's not so bad I guess. It is, to me, but, I don't know. I got kicked out of my old school. Just for, stuff, and it was the public school and we didn't have so much money and my parents didn't know what to do and I was just so shitty. And they found out I was gay and dating Alex they didn't take it well and then my grandparents just paid to send me here and, shit, just, I ruined so much for them."

"Oh." Jack glanced at him, acting strange and nervous, something that Kellin wasn't used to seeing from him.

"Why?" Jack asked.

"I dunno, I just. I've felt guilty about this... thing, for so long and I don't know, I just wanted to know if you had something too."

"I think we all do." It sounded cryptic and mysterious and Jack realized it too, so he broke the seriousness by giggling and he really had a nice giggle and Kellin realized that he had never heard Vic giggle.

"So, what's the thing?" Jack asked, this sly look coming over his face that made Kellin realize that he wanted to know what Kellin was guilty for.

"Oh, no, um-"

"I told you, you tell me." Kellin almost felt terrified and stared at Jack, who didn't seem to be letting up.

"It was just. Something." Jack gave a little smile that was sort of sad and sort of something that Kellin couldn't place so he just kept going without actually saying what Jack wanted to hear. "I just feel like, god, it might, it would help to get it off my chest because it's been, fucking, ruining my life for the longest time and I want to talk about it and now wouldn't be a bad time to talk about it but I- I can't." But can't wasn't the right word because really, Kellin could talk about it except he was the one convincing himself that he couldn't and the only people who had ever heard about it were the people at the hospital and his mom. But, fuck, he was so high off of painkillers that none of them believed it and there was no reason to be making it up but they had all taken it as an excuse for him taking too many pills and cutting too close to his veins. Evidently, not close enough.

"Is it really ruining your life?" That question sort of took things and put them in a sort of perspective because Kellin's life wasn't shitty, it wasn't ruined, it had just. He didn't know what had happened it was just that he had been stupid and now all he wanted was snow and a breath of properly fresh air.

"Not currently. Not- well, whatever it was, is, it's not happening anymore. It just... changed everything. And I just don't know what to do with myself." Jack looked at him, watched his fingers pick at his nails, so pale under the faint moonlight.

"You can talk about it. Don't have to." And god Kellin wanted to, he just wanted to blurt everything out and go on the longest story telling rant and it would be the easiest to do right then and right there and Jack didn't care he was just Jack and everything was fine so he was kind of getting there, kind of thinking over what he would say, thinking over anything and everything that could happen because of what he said and just-

"I got raped." Then he realized that he had said it and Jack made proper eye contact with him, his face all sorts of serious that made Kellin feel like for once he wasn't making up what he was saying and this sort of genuinely steady feeling of something maybe perhaps too serious for both of them and Jack got it, Jack got it because he said-

"Shit." And they stared at each other like they didn't know what to say because they didn't and it could have been worse and it all could have been better and Kellin hadn't even said anything but his words were carried clearly across to Jack who was now thinking too much about his friend and their eyes were still locked and then, of course, "Shit, I-I'm sorry."

"It's fine." All of a sudden, Kellin got really, really sad. It wasn't like he had been feeling happy before but it was so weird and odd now that Jack knew what had happened and it was too fucking hot outside so Kellin ripped off his hoodie and felt sick when it made the rolls of his stomach jiggle, why was it so hot for winter? Why was it so fucking hot there, it was San Francisco, it was supposed to be cooler, that was the whole point!

"Jesus fuck," he said and that's really what he needed to say to get everything back in motion again.

"Are you alri-"

"I'm just, I'm great but I'm still wondering why it fucking had to happen because I'm not sure if I deserved it because why else would it have happened? Maybe I was just meant to not be here, maybe it was all some elaborate scheme to actually get me to fucking die because honestly I'd rather be-"

"No, I think you'd rather be alive." Jack said loudly, then stopping and clearing his throat. The breath he took was shaky. "No one deserves it when they get hurt like that and I'm sorry that, jesus, that that happened but you can't say that you'd rather be dead. It's not true. It's not." It was sometime in that moment where the huge scars along Kellin's arm and the information that Jack had just received all clicked together and he stood up, running his hands through his hair.

"Fuck!" That was loud enough, and Kellin stood up after that, stumbling and coming up with "listens" and "waits" but none of it was going to work and Jack had tears in his eyes and Kellin almost felt like he was going to cry when Jack said.

"You're not going anywhere." His voice was so choked up and Kellin didn't know what had made him that emotional but maybe putting the pieces together to realize that one of his best friends had gotten raped and had then attempted suicide could make him slightly emotional and then Kellin was getting a hug that he tensed away from at first but soon he realized that Jack was shaking and that he could let go of the breath he had been holding.

:::::::

"Hey."

She wasn't breathing. Her eyes were barely open, all squinty like they were when she was tired. Like they were when they had curled up on the couch with the whole family and ate dried cranberries and watched a video of the ball dropping on New Years in New York City and she had said "we live in New York, why can't we go?" and they had never driven her to New York City even though it was just two hours away and now when her eyes shut this time, they weren't going to open again.

"Hey, Avery."

She wasn't moving. Her mouth was open a bit, like she was sleeping. The way she had slept when they were on the airplane because she was scared of flying and had clung on to Tay but had ended up drooling on her once they had finally gotten in the air. This time, her mouth wouldn't open and speak anything ever again.

"Avery."

She couldn't hear. She couldn't smile the way she did when she had last been outside and they had walked downtown and walked past one of those cars that were absolutely blasting music and seemed to make the air around it vibrate she had said "one day, I'm gonna put my car on 100" except she had forgotten a word in the sentence and Tay had pointed it out and they had gone into unnecessary hysterics over it.

"Avery, please."

Her mind was less than it had been now, it didn't work the way it had. It wouldn't give her the possibility of gasping the way she had when they had been crammed into a taxi and had first driven over the bridge at night; the view had made Tay smile but Avery had taken the deepest, loudest breath when she first saw all the buildings lit up against the black night sky, all of it was reflected in her eyes.

Tay took her hand the same way that she had when it had been their dad in the hospital. Avery didn't squeeze it the way she usually did, a reassuring way to show that she was there and alright and wasn't going anywhere. Not this time. This time, she was going somewhere. This time, her squeaky little high pitched voice was never going to speak again and that was the worst part because the words Avery spoke were always so funny, they always brought something better to the world and it had reached the point where Avery was no longer going to be part of the world anymore and Tay had told herself that she was never going to cry in front of her sister again but she supposed that this time it didn't matter. Everything about Avery seemed to weaken and bend in that moment and Tay was desperately watching her for any sign of movement, any sign of life, but none of it was coming and it was all falling apart and the tears were falling, hot drops falling down her face.

"Please don' cry Tay-tay. 'M sorry. 'S okay. Everything 's okay." It wasn't fair and it had never been fair but Avery's younger words from when their father had died played back in Tay's mind because this time, who was going to comfort her? Who was going to tell her that everything was okay?

Tay was holding Avery's hand so tightly that she felt as though she might break it, as though it was so delicate that it might shatter, like her porcelain skin might crack, and she was so cold.

"You can let go, baby, anytime you want. It's okay." She didn't want to force Avery to stay. There had been nights like these before but none had been so unresponsive, in the end, Avery had always come back around at some point but this time both of them knew that it was the end. "Daddy's waiting for you, he's gonna meet you in heaven. Tell him hi from me, yeah?" Her words were all wobbly now and all the monitors had weaker and weaker signals and it was raining outside, pouring down fucking pain because Avery loved the sunshine and it wasn't fair that she had to die in the rain.

"Please don' cry Tay-tay." Tay was shaking so hard that she felt as though she might crack into the pieces that would all end up on the floor like Avery's shattered porcelain skin and they would be cleaned up and thrown away but at least then they would still be together, at least then they wouldn't have to be apart.

"I love you," Tay breathed, and it was her last breath because the heart monitor stopped. The entire world stopped. The tears stopped, the pain stopped, the agony stopped, it all stopped. Everything stopped.

"Everything 's okay."


	15. Colorblind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> named after colorblind by counting crows. lots of mention of suicide and descriptions of self harm mind yourselves

December 20th.

A special day.

Or it was supposed to be, and special wasn't the right word for it because it wasn't special anymore, no, now it was just a bad day. The worst day. Now it was just a day where Kellin had somehow actually slept without anything bad taking place in his mind yet he couldn't get himself out of bed and it all felt like it had before and the light coming in through the blinds was too bright and everything was a big mess of too much.

"Kellin." It was Vic and he was probably wondering why Kellin wasn't awake, first off, and why he wasn't getting ready for class and why he was just lying in bed. "Are you coming to class?"

"No." Maybe it would have been better to at least try to go and spend time with people and try to distract himself because that's what he had done last year except last year, fuck, it had all been too exciting.

"Are you alright?" In his mind, the decision was made to actually go to class because if he lay in bed all day with nothing but his thoughts, things probably wouldn't turn out so well. Still, he couldn't be compelled to reply. Vic hung around him, cracking at his knuckles and acting awkward. "Do you want me to tell the office you're sick? ....So they don't get mad?" He asked, too kind for his own good.

"No. I'm- I'll come." Kellin's words were muffled by the blankets. "You can go." Even quieter.

"Okay." And Vic left without another word, shutting the door gently behind him.

\- 1 yr -

December 20th.

A special day.

He was excited, maybe too excited, maybe oddly ecstatic, and it was that day where everything was so completely worth it. All of the eating had been worth it, the cutting had been worth it, the date had been worth it, and he wasn't going to regret any of it.

At first, he had been sort of upset when he realize that he would lose the sharp edges of himself, bony knees, knobby elbows, outlined ribs, a jawline. But he had come to realize that it couldn't matter as much as he made it seem and that, after all, it was just a body.

That morning, it was easier than ever to get out of bed because the odd comfort was knowing that it was his last morning alive. Maybe it sounded worse than he wanted but it was completely reassuring to know that he wouldn't have to go through any of it ever again.

It could happen one last time, he could binge one last time, he could cry one last time, he could cut one last time. He could breathe one last time. And then it would all be over.

It would all be over.

\- -

Tay didn't meet him at the edge of the hall like she usually did. That was already a bad start, the anxiety and fear of not having Tay around, of having to do his english presentation all alone, of everything like that because it was pathetic but it was one of those little things he had come to depend on in his day.

Every other day, he would meet Tay at around 7:45 in the morning right at the corner of the language hallway and the history hallway. She would usually bring apples because she was an apple freak, but once brought pears, which had been an exciting change. And they would eat their apples and talk and switch homework answers if needed, and then they would go to class and it was always a decent start to the day but Tay didn't know that it was Kellin's suicide date and Kellin didn't know that Tay's sister had just died.

So Kellin was terrified for sort of no reason and Tay was terrified for all of the right reasons but one of them ended up stuttering his way through his english presentation and one of them had to have her hand pried away from her dead sister's one.

\- 1 yr -

They were watching him. Again. He sort of wanted to talk to them, to maybe say something because they had been his best friends, and they had had a pretty heavy influence on his life. It was something that he wasn't sure of at all and wasn't confident in in the last, so he sat alone and ate his food like he usually did and glanced up at them every so often because he could see their eyes on him.

Brandon looked like he wanted to come over. It had started looking like that more and more, his face seemed more sympathetic than angry, but then Jake would butt in and draw the conversation back to something else and Brandon would just look back at Kellin with a different sort of expression. He pitied him.

Kellin wanted to scare them. He wanted to say something cryptic without sounding stupid and he wanted to say his goodbyes and get it completely over with so he debated in his mind while he ate and just decided to pass a message through Brandon because it had to be the right thing to do.

They had health together at the end of the day, where they sat on complete opposite sides of the room. Kellin couldn't remember exactly when Brandon had switched his desk from Kellin's side to somewhere as far away as he could get, but he remembered that it was around then when things had started going really wrong.

Class ended and everyone headed towards the door but Kellin found himself in Brandon's way, hoping to get his words out.

"Do you still talk to Matt?" He blurted out, trying to ignore the look on his old friend's face.

"Yeah." Brandon didn't say anything else but didn't try to move.

"Can you tell him thank you from me?" Kellin asked, feeling all too nervous but somehow all too good about what was happening.

"For what?"

"He'll know." For a second, Kellin realized how much it all might hurt Matt.

"Alright." And they stared at each other for a second before Kellin turned back around and Brandon tried to speak but nothing could change anything, nothing could help.

\- -

"Do any of you know where Tay is?" Kellin's question was met by casual head shakes and Jack's quiet reply of "maybe she's sick." Ryan seemed out of it, way too happy, and had left the cafeteria in a sort of dazed way halfway through their lunch period. Jack and Kellin were left in an awkward silence that was only filled by the crunching of Jack's chips.

"You look like shit." Jack finally said.

"I know." There always seemed to be too many awkward silences in their serious conversations.

"Did something happen?"

"A while ago. Today." Jack crumpled up his chip bag. He probably thought it was what they had discussed last night. The word that neither of them wanted to speak.

"Are you alright?"

"Will be." It was odd that neither of them seemed to be able to say it, especially Kellin. Weird in the way that he had been craving snow for a while but now he was ready for summer, now he wanted long days and late sunsets, warm nights and crickets at night. And he wanted to say it, he wanted to scream all of the secrets wrapped around his heart out because he felt so damn trapped and wanted to get the words out of his mouth, wanted to stop choking on the lines that he had almost screamed at the hospital, "He raped me, he raped me," over and fucking over until it all dissolved into his mind and tears, maybe, he didn't exactly remember what had happened in those weeks, but what he knew now was that Jack knew all the wrong things and that he was worried about Tay.

"It's just today, today sucks. I'll be better tomorrow." Lies, all of it was fucking lies because he was never going to be better if he couldn't even face what had happened, if he couldn't get used to the fact that, yes, oh my god, he was fat and he wasn't the same person he had been three years ago and he had to come to terms with all of it and say that maybe he would feel somewhat better tomorrow, but he wouldn't be better. That would take more than one sleepless night to carry him through from the twentieth to the twenty first.

"What's wrong with today?" And maybe all Kellin did was think about himself because Jack's usually fluffy hair looked all greasy and his eyes seemed less bright and the smile that always seemed to sort of be there wasn't really there. At all. Today might not have been Jack's favorite day either.

"Nothing. It's just... today."

\- 1 yr -

He wondered too often if his feelings were justified. It was the sad part that most often he realized that they weren't. Because he could do something about it if he actually wanted to, if he actually tried, right? There were all sorts of things on the internet going around about how people who had been raped or sexually abused were valid and didn't have to feel guilty for anything and should always start by telling someone that something was happening but jesus christ, they always used female pronouns.

Because he was just a fucking kid, just a kid in high school who didn't know what was happening except that it shouldn't be, and that it just didn't happen to men. Period. It was only women who got raped, only women who got abused, only women with eating disorders, only women. And Kellin was losing his mind because he had been taught that men were strong and that's all they were, they didn't cry, they didn't feel anything but what everyone else felt. They had to have perfect bodies and personalities or else they were instantly discarded and Kellin was feeling more thrown away than he ever had, like he wasn't worthy of love and wasn't going to get it even if he was worth it. He wasn't worth anything.

Which was why he wasn't having any thoughts of doubt that day and maybe it should have scared him but nothing seemed to scare him anymore. People are scared of things that can hurt them. Heights, the dark, spiders, the ocean. The unknown. Things that can result in pain, things that are miserable to them, and Kellin was going to die. It was finally going to happen. And it was a blessing.

He wouldn't have to spend another day living a life that no one wanted him in, he wouldn't have to spend another night in pieces, he wouldn't have to spend another day at war with his mind, he wouldn't have to continue the agonizing cycle of pain and silence that he had been living in, his head wouldn't burn anymore and his body would stop aching.

It would all stop.

\- -

Tay didn't show up in science and Kellin dropped a beaker on the floor.

It shattered.

He stared at it for a good while as other people stared at him until the creepy teacher shouted at him and he slowly cleaned up the glass, handling the shards so very carefully. He wondered how it would feel to drag them over pure scar tissue, to reopen the old wounds, to feel the exact same pain that he had craved not so long ago.

It wasn't fair that he could only stand a certain amount of time in class before he felt like breaking and could only imagine any kinds of sharp objects slicing into his skin just like they had before, just like they had exactly a year ago, oh my god he felt so sick and found himself asking to use the bathroom before he found himself crying in the middle of class but sitting down on the dirty bathroom floors wouldn't help either so he took his bag with him out of class, unnoticed by the teacher.

And he went back to his room. He didn't go back to binge, he didn't go back to cut, he didn't go back to take too many pills, he went back to get away and it was all he needed because he was on the verge of a really, really bad panic attack that he could feel coming from miles away.

Fuck.

It all collapsed when he locked the door to his room behind him, his body shook and his eyes teared up and he was on the floor wondering where his breath had gone, wondering why it was so dark, wondering why he couldn't move, wondering why his body wasn't his own and why everything hurt so much.

\- 1 yr -

It was dark. Always, always dark. He sat on his bed, wondering if it would happen that night and of course it would have to, of course. It was the perfect way to end off his life. And he shouldn't have been so terrified because he was trying to convince himself that there was no longer any reason to be afraid but he had never liked the feeling of someone's hands on his body without him wanting them there.

That was what was wrong.

The door cracked open and the little ray of light that broke into his room made him flinch and he felt so sick, he felt terrible and out of control and nothing had even happened yet, it was just dark and everything was about to fall apart.

Which it did.

"Don't make a fucking sound."

It was okay to feel invisible sometimes.

"You're disgusting, you know that?"

He did know that and it was the reason that he wasn't spending the rest of his night curled against the side of his bed, barely breathing and bleeding too much. Finally, it ended. And then, everything else could end.

\- -

"Kellin. Hey, hey, Kell. Kellin." A hand on top of his was enough to bring him back for just long enough to pull himself back, and Vic got enough of it to pull his own hand back. "What's wrong?" He asked, sitting down far enough from Kellin that he wasn't too close, but not far enough to be awkward.

Stuttered breaths weren't clear enough to get words out and Kellin was shaking too hard and it was all spinning around in his head, useless, failure, disgusting, worthless, useless, useless, useless.

He was crying. And for once, he didn't care, because he was completely somewhere else in his mind where crying was okay because it wouldn't have to happen anymore, man, he wanted to live in a world where crying was okay.

Vic thought crying was perfectly fine but, frankly, was pretty worried about his friend, and god, he had thought about it too much and discussed it with Jenna and he didn't want to accept it but maybe he had a small, tiny, minuscule crush on Kellin that he really didn't know what to think of and, just, it was weird, everything was weird, and Kellin sitting on the floor crying and shaking and being completely unresponsive was weird but there was nothing else for Vic to do but sit and try to talk to him.

"Kelllllinn, hey! Hey." The "heys" were making a terrific comeback but Kellin was completely elsewhere, it was fucking bad and Vic had absolutely no idea what to do.

"Kellin. You're here, come on, you're you. It's 2016, fuck that, it's almost 2017. Almost, right? You're in San Francisco, it's December, it's almost 2017, you're Kellin Quinn and you're 17 and you're from Oregon. You, um, you don't like math, or too much of the sun, look-you're friends with Jack, and Ryan, and Tay..." Kellin had closed his eyes and seemed to be evening out his breaths. "And, well, I'm Vic. I'm from San Diego, I've never seen snow, I hate cats, I-" And Vic felt so powerless because Kellin was crying again, as if he had ever even stopped, and wrapped his arms around himself.

"Once, once I was in a pet shop. Me and my little brother and we wanted a pet dog but we ended up not getting one, and, anyways, and there was an earthquake. I guess there would be more earthquakes up here than down in San Diego but, I mean, it's California. Earthquakes everywhere. I don't like them. And there was an earthquake and all these animals got freaked out and they all had reactions but the fish, they-" he smiled a bit at the memory, "they all looked sort of surprised. I have never seen fish look surprised. Can you imagine a fish looking all shocked? I don't know, it was, it was funny." Then, it was silent. So Vic reached his hand forward and brushed his thumb right under Kellin's eye, wiping away a tear.

Finally, he opened his eyes. The two stared at each other, both nervous and upset in their own ways.

"You good?" Vic asked. Kellin shook his head.

\- 1 yr -

It was cold. It was perfect. He had the windows down while driving even though it might have been under ten degrees outside. He could feel every breath of cold air bite his lungs and swirl through his body, it was amazing to think that in not too much time at all, oxygen wouldn't be useful to him at all. Lights seemed to blur while he drove, and he decided what to do right before he passed the turn off for the highway.

Burger King. It was cheap and it was greasy and he had panicked and ordered for much more than he had wanted but had paid for all of it and had ended up eating all of it. And it was sad because it still wasn't the worst binge he had had.

And then everything seemed to get all weird and he felt too big for everything, too much for everything, he felt the worst that he ever had. He felt better than he ever had before.

Then the question came, the best decision of his life. Which should he try first, the pills or blade? He supposed that he should cut first, and did not hesitate for one second before digging the blade of the box cutter into his arm, slicing vertically through his skin. It felt like heaven. He could feel the blade cutting right through the skin, the way it felt rough and shallow at first and then felt deep and warm, less than a sting and more like a groaning ache, like a bruise except more, he loved the pain. Blood welled up immediately, snaking down his skin, and before he knew it, he couldn't see the pale white of his arm anymore. After making four huge cuts straight down his arm, he began to feel light headed. Blood completely covered his arm, soaking onto the chair beneath him, it felt warm and comforting and absolutely euphoric. 

And he knew that he had to take the pills.

And he knew that after that, it would all be over.

And he smiled.

His left hand didn't shake as it twisted the cap off of the bottle. His stomach didn't feel too full anymore after he got all the pills he could manage down his throat. His arm didn't sting. His thighs didn't ache, his knees didn't hurt, nothing felt bad.

It all felt too good.

\- -

They sat on the couch, side by side.

"I tried to kill myself. Today. Last year." Vic wouldn't look him in the eyes.

"Why?"

"I was-um. I, well. I got abused. Um. Sexually. And then raped, yeah, that was..." He would have said something like "great," or "fun" to be sarcastic but it wasn't even funny, it hadn't been great and it hadn't been fun and he still felt as though his chest was closing in whenever the words had to cross his lips. 

"Fuck." Vic said flatly.

"Yeah." Kellin said. And they sat. "You believe me?" It sounded so innocent worded that way, and Vic finally met Kellin's bright green eyes.

"Of course I believe you." Vic bit back words that he was coming up with, and instead just sat and looked miserable because he wasn't sure what to say anymore.

"I ate more because I thought if I got fat then no one would want to do anything to me anymore." Kellin said, not really knowing why. His voice broke. Vic's eyes had dark circles under them, and looked so heavy and sad. "That's why-" Kellin broke off, "that's why I can't- why I- I kept binging because I was convinced that it was going to help me but here I am, not being hurt anymore and now I have an eating disorder and I gained a hundred fucking pounds and now it's all just a reminder of what I could have fixed if I was brave enough."

"Don't say that." Now both of them were getting emotional because Kellin had never told anyone what he was saying and Vic was coming to realize that Kellin was really very important to him and was just a little bit overwhelmed. "You can't blame yourself, and it was in the past, all of that was in the past-"

"-But I'm still-I'm still disgusting."

"You're not disgusting. You're not. I can promise you that." But Kellin shook his head and swallowed his tears.

"You wouldn't know."

"I don't have to know because in all honesty, I think- I think you're really pretty. And you're so strong, really, you're here, aren't you? Wouldn't you rather be alive, right here and now?"

"Yeah."

"Well, good. Because you are." 

\- 1 yr -

Kellin woke up.


	16. Santa Stole My Girlfriend

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> named after santa stole my girlfriend by the maine i love that band and also this song woo hoo

It was almost Christmas and Vic and Kellin had gone to a shitty restaurant with Jack and Alex which felt too much like a double date and would have been a lot better if Jenna and Tay had come.

Which they hadn't because Tay wouldn't open her door and according to Jenna, who had told this to Vic, who had told this to Kellin, she was still alive but something had happened and she would be okay but wasn't at that moment in time. At least she had someone there for her.

Kellin spent a good amount of the night trying to melt into the space between the window and the edge of the booth, and booths were the best and they had snatched one right in the back of the place, but he was too anxious to order anything so Vic did it for him which made him feel like a fucking five year old, so he just sat sort of angstily while everyone else had a proper conversation.

He barely knew Alex, anyways, and had heard a lot about him from Jack but Kellin still wasn't sure what to think of him. It was sort of odd that he had heard so much about Alex's personal problems before he had actually introduced himself to him, because it always went that you met someone and later on you found out about their deep dark secrets but Kellin had been informed all about Alex's messy family and mental disorders far before he had even seen what color his hair was.

It was pink, that's what it was. And not a pretty pink.

He felt fat and it was now he felt even more fat because he was surrounded by people who just weren't, and he was altogether a really undesirable excuse for a human, but Vic kept giving him little grins and things and he liked Vic, but.

But he knew that nothing could ever happen between them. Vic could call him pretty a million times and nothing would ever change because Vic hadn't seen anything yet, he had seen a chubby face and scarred arms, he hadn't seen the scars that were layered like cobwebs across his thighs, the expanse of his stomach that not even the baggiest shirts could hide, he didn't know. And he wouldn't know.

Everyone else was talking about fairy lights when their food came. And everyone started eating except for Kellin who was taking out all of his anger and hatred through his eyes at the plate in front of him. It wasn't a lot of food, it was fine, it was some sort of sandwich, which would make a lot of sense because it was a fucking sandwich place but he didn't know what was in it and he didn't know how many calories it was and it was so weird how food worked, how calories worked, how fat worked, how everyone at the table ate the same foods but something had gone wrong with him, he felt like he was embarrassing everyone just by sitting there, maybe by just existing, and it was all because of that stupid sandwich.

And he couldn't help but feel like he was taking up too much space, like he was just too big too big too big too big too big too-

He couldn't eat the sandwich because a stranger named Alex was sitting diagonally across the table from him and he couldn't- he couldn't stand to know that Alex was judging him somehow inside of his mind and he had spent enough time around Vic and Jack that he knew enough of what they thought of him and Alex was a blank slate- he felt like he was going to have a breakdown.

It wasn't a good time.

:::::::

Kellin was lying in bed, wondering what he was going to get for Tay as a secret santa present. He was debating not getting anything because no one was sure if she was even going to show up, but he decided that he might as well because he was such a good friend.

The night had ended on an adequate note, with Vic having a very long conversation with him in the cramped bathroom of the sandwich place, and then going to Under the Sun to pick up their secret Santa names. And Kellin had met some new, nice people but he had been on edge and now, well, now he was thinking.

But not bad thinking, not really.

He was thinking about Vic.

Thinking about if it could work, really, if one day Kellin would allow someone's hands on his body and enjoy them there for once, if he could go a week without a mental breakdown about how hopeless and, consequently, helpless he was.

He had stopped sleeping in his jeans. The first step had been actually lying down in his bed, and it didn't help that the exact morning he had woken up crying because of a nightmare that took place in his exact bed. Perhaps spending the night having too small jeans dig into his stomach kept him awake and kept him aware that he was in real life and not living in a terrifying flashback. He supposed the second step had been not sleeping in his jeans anymore. So he didn't. And it felt ridiculous that they had become like, armor, and kept him up so he wouldn't have to dream about getting hurt, but sometimes being kept up made him want to turn himself into a dream again.

But dreams could turn to nightmares without warning. All it took was a little fear and a little instability, a couple pills, maybe a sharp blade or two. Kellin didn't want to turn his head into a nightmare, and he didn't want a nightmare in his head. 

Eventually, he just fell asleep. For once, with no dreams. Or nightmares.

:::::::

Sometime around two in the morning, shortly after Kellin fell asleep, Vic woke up. Alone. And he wasn't alone because Kellin was curled up in his blankets mere feet away but Vic missed the feeling of waking up in someone's arms, he missed affection. He had always been an affectionate person and liked physical contact except he didn't like it so much when it became more and more like kicks and punches and less and less like kisses and cuddling.

It wasn't fair, not at all.

Vic felt alone and unloved, he wanted to talk to someone and the only person there was Kellin, who was asleep. Which didn't stop Vic from poking him over and over again until he finally woke up.

"Yeah?" He asked, squinting in the dim light. When Vic didn't speak, not really knowing what to say at all, Kellin pushed himself up into a sitting position and watched Vic with a concerned look as he sat down on his bed. "What's wrong?" It was then that Kellin noticed the tears, the way Vic's thin and bruised hands were shaking, that talking might result in tears and oh god.

"I don't know." Vic began, knowing exactly what was wrong. "I mean- I do- but, I don't- it-I-I feel just, unloved. Unloveable, maybe? That's fun, not able to be loved- I don't know, I'm-just. A mess." He sank down onto the edge of Kellin's bed, tugging his hands through his tangled hair.

"I want to feel like someone cares, for once- I- I can't, I've been back and no one, nobody cares, but-" His voice seemed to get too frantic too quickly, and his eyes seemed awfully glassy.

"Don't say that." Kellin pushed his blankets back and moved over to sit next to Vic. "People do care. I care. Alex cares. Gee cares. Jenna cares. Jack-"

"But they don't, they never, they never checked in- I just- you, I'm. You're not wearing pants." And through the faint existence of his tears, Vic smiled a bit. Kellin had forgotten for the time that he was just wearing his boxers instead of his jeans and it felt better, so much better, but his stomach looked so much more there and his scarred thighs weren't at all pretty and he pulled away on instinct and then Vic leaned into him, resting his head on Kellin's shoulder.

"No, don't. You have pretty legs." If anyone had pretty legs, it was Vic. He had thin, lean legs, dark and scabbed, bruised and cut up but still, pretty. They were very pretty. Kellin just had fat legs. That's all they were. Except for the faded bruises and cuts on his knees, some from kneeling at the toilet to throw up, others from things he didn't like to remember. Vic leaned into Kellin's chest, his eyes fluttering. Kellin pulled himself properly back onto the bed and maneuvered Vic so he was in between Kellin's legs, his back pressed against Kellin's chest.

"People love you," Kellin said softly, almost tensing up as Vic completely leaned against him.

"Do you believe in love?" Vic asked, tilting his head back a bit. Kellin was so soft and warm, so secure, so exactly what he needed, so something he didn't think that he was good enough for.

"I think I might," Kellin replied. Vic curled up a bit, bringing his knees up and pulling back into Kellin, he just felt so safe. He was wearing one of Kellin's big pullover hoodies that smelled good and were all fluffy inside and Kellin's pale arms hung lightly around him, his scars simply darker stripes in the faint light in their otherwise dark room.

"Why?" Vic said, running his finger down the side of Kellin's leg.

"Because life isn't all bad things. And there are parts to love. And people to love." His voice was so calming, and Vic found his eyes closing, his body warm, safe. Oh, so safe. His eyes closed. Kellin was so soft.

:::::::

The next morning arrived in a burst of too-bright light through the open blinds and a loud knocking on the door. Which was then followed by the panicked yell of "Kellin!" in a voice that sounded too much like Jack Barakat's for Kellin to just ignore.

So he fell out of bed and found pants to put on while Vic shoved his head under the pillows as though he wouldn't be moving them in a second because he needed air to breathe and he needed to breathe to stay alive, so.

Kellin opened the door to reveal a very alarmed looking Jack who was probably hopped up on caffeine of some sort.

"I need to go shopping." He stated, being very, very serious about it all.

"Shopping?" Kellin repeated, rubbing his hand over his face. "What time is it?"

"Christmas time, Kellin, Christmas time, and I don't have any presents for anyone and I need to go with you. Please." Turns out, it was about 9:30 in the morning, and Kellin did, in fact, go shopping with Jack.

With a sixty dollar budget and too many friends to buy gifts for, Jack didn't shut his mouth for a whole hour downtown. Kellin had forgotten all about buying people presents and Jack didn't know what to buy for anyone, so they spent about ten minutes pacing around in circles and debating what to buy for people.

In the end, they both bought Tay snapbacks and then paced around for a while more because, really, they didn't know what to buy for anyone.

"Lush." Jack stated, snapping his fingers.

"What?"

"We need a Lush." When they found their Lush, which took longer than either of them wanted, Jack nearly cried over the prices while Kellin nearly had a coughing fit because it all smelled so strong. After Jack got past the initial shock of how expensive everything was, he decided that he wanted to smell every damn thing in the store, ask for samples of moisturizers, and try on the lipsticks. They both bought things for Jenna and Gee, and got sidetracked at a Sephora where Jack put on mascara without using a tester thing, and was told that he had to buy it.

Both him and Kellin kept their mouths shut as he managed to buy it with a straight face, but ended up having a collective laugh attack.

It felt good to laugh. Not in the cheesy, 'oh, I haven't laughed in too long!' way, but sort of, really, just in the way that laughing over Jack's eyelashes in the middle of a busy street was something that did feel cheesy, and felt good. Different. Different like the realization that Kellin had slept in the same bed as Vic the previous night, different like how he had slept in the same bed as Vic and without pants.

Him and Jack ended up swamped with bags sitting on a bench under a weird heat lamp thing, watching people go by. They had been out for a while and had finally gotten everyone presents, which had taken a while, because both of them were indecisive and were bad at knowing what people wanted.

Tinny Christmas music was playing from somewhere, and the air cut like a knife across Kellin's lips. It was perfectly cold and flawlessly bright, a day that perfectly marked how Christmas time felt. All of it made Kellin feel happier than he should, and he unconsciously smiled as Jack mumbled to himself while he went through what he had bought. At some point, he finished, and turned his attention back to his friend.

"Seriously," Jack began, which was never really a good way to start a sentence. "What is it with you and Vic?"

"What is what with me and Vic?" Was it Vic and I in that situation, or was that only used for starting off a sentence? Kellin didn't know.

"What, you guys aren't, like, together-"

"No," interrupted Kellin. "I'm not gay. No way. That's-" he cut off before he could say anything that would be taken as offensive because Jack was looking like he couldn't believe what Kellin had just said.

"No, yes, it's fine for you to be gay, but I am in no way gay. Not me." Kellin rushed to continue, while Jack stared at him, eyebrows raised in disbelief.

"Is something wrong with being gay?" He was just confused and Kellin wasn't going to explain anything to de-confuse him because it was all too much and completely unnecessary and Kellin could be straight and like a guy, right? That was perfectly normal. Anyways, he loved girls. Girls were the best. Girls were great. He was so straight for girls. Totally.

So maybe he had never found anything actually hot about girls, but he had never thought about guys that way either and he wasn't supposed to, oh god, never, he didn't like girls and he didn't want to like guys, so there was nothing else to like.

"Nothing is wrong with being gay. And I'm not gay for Vic."

"He was sleeping in your bed." Jack stated, matter of fact.

:::::::

"Babe." It came out of nowhere and Jenna didn't take it back because it would have been worse that way. She was standing beside Tay's bed with some latte thing from Starbucks and a muffin, because Tay was a muffin person. "Wake up, it's Christmas!" She added, making the "babe" fade awkwardly off into neverland.

Tay hadn't left her room all week, and only left her bed to piss and brush her teeth from time to time.

"'s Christmas?" Tay's faint voice came out muffled from her pillows, but at least it was her voice. Perhaps it was more hoarse than usual from lack of use but she was talking, she was reacting for once, and Jenna took the chance to wave the coffee around in Tay's face.

"I was gonna go to Under the Sun for their thing. You know that everyone would want you there." And then, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Tay sat up.

Jenna had been hovering around her bed all week, sometimes sitting on the edges, sometimes lying in it with her, lots of times just standing next to it. It was the sort of constant support that Tay had needed when her father had died, and she wasn't at all surprised to get from Jenna.

She supposed that she should thank her.

Jenna had ditched multiple classes that week to spend more time with Tay because she had to, of course, there was no way she would leave her friend alone.

"It's Christmas," Jenna repeated, loosening her grip on the Starbucks cup as Tay gently took it from her. "There's a muffin too. Chocolate chip."

"Thanks," Tay mumbled, half hearted and not knowing how to get a properly apology across. She couldn't get the sound of Avery's stopped heart rate out of her head, and Jenna couldn't get the sight of Tay standing outside of the hospital in the rain, crying, out of her head.

"Do you wanna come to Under the Sun?" Jenna asked quietly. She didn't want to pressure Tay into going anywhere but she really didn't want to show up at a party alone, and besides, she had bought people presents and did want to give them to people in a civilized fashion.

"Sure." Tay said, instantly wondering if she would regret it.

"You're okay to?" Jenna asked, and Tay shrugged.

"I'm not changing though," Tay said, like she had every day that week. It would have made sense to change out of the crumpled clothes that you had been living in all week, but Tay refused to change hers because they were the last ones that had touched Avery.

It made sense.

Tay drank her coffee and ate her muffin slowly while Jenna talked at her. Her eyes were still blank and definitely still red, but she looked less like she had been punched in the face and thrown off of a very high building.

"I haven't gotten anyone a present." She said slowly. "Just you and Kellin." Jenna should have been happy that she was one of the special people that got a present from Tay, but the atmosphere seemed too serious for a smile.

"It doesn't matter," Jenna said, because her own presents were shitty anyways and she was sure that Christmas didn't have to all revolve around the presents people bought each other. "What did you get Kellin?" She asked, trying to continue the conversation.

"It's stupid." So Jenna didn't ask any more, and resolved to find out more later. About an hour of awkward words exchanged later, they were finally on their way.

The sun was out. Tay squinted and drew her shoulders up but both of them knew that rain would make Tay feel more like she was standing outside the hospital with her hair soaking wet and her clothing stuck to her skin. Neither of them wanted a reminder of Avery's death in the air around them.

Though Tay was feeling it all the time, because every second that passed added to her pain and grief, because for the space of a few brief heartbeats, she found herself forgetting that her sister was gone forever and she wouldn't be able to see her ever again.

But it was Christmas time, which might have been the best time for Avery to die, not as though there was ever a good time for someone to die, but Avery had never liked Christmas. She always said that it was too focused on a religion that not every person practiced and Tay had laughed and just thought of how smart that was, but hadn't said it. She should have.

The outside of Under the Sun was decorated with fairy lights, the inside was too, but Tay pulled on Jenna's hand before they went in because she was scared and wasn't in the mood for talking to anyone except maybe Jenna and Kellin.

"It's okay," Jenna said, her voice calming. Tay loved Jenna's voice because it was so smooth and just so nice, pitch-wise too, with her Australian accent adding something different to it and it was so pretty, so damned beautiful, and what she didn't know was that Jenna had always associated her voice with being so sexy, so rough, their voices were the complete opposites and yet they adored them and fuck they were just-

Voices.

"Okay."

And they went inside, Tay almost hiding behind Jenna. Kellin, who had been hanging around and watching the door for a good part of the time he had been there, noticed them first. Tay detached from Jenna when she saw him and instantly sort of melted into his arms, burying her face in his chest.

"Hey, hi." He said, his voice nearly giving her chills. "Are you okay?" She didn't reply, and held onto him as if for dear life. Finally, she pulled back a bit. 

"Avery." It's all he needed to hear to realize what had happened, and he didn't seem to know what to say, as if he ever did. 

"I'm sorry."

"Yeah." He noticed everything, he always did, how dark the circles under her eyes were, how bad her skin looked, how greasy her hair was, how crumpled his clothes were. Kellin had spent his fair share of days lying in the dark and wishing he was dead, and he would give anything to make sure his friends didn't have to feel that way. But it was so hard when your sibling had died, or you had tried to kill yourself and it hadn't even worked, yeah, it was hard to stay positive when things like that happened. 

Tay stuck close to Kellin who was sticking close to Vic, who Jenna was sticking close to for the rest of the night. Presents were exchanged and mistletoe was strung around but the four of them stuck together like something was bound to shatter them. 

But it was okay to be sad, after all, it was Christmas time.


	17. Sun

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> named after sun by two door cinema club. fun times.

Kellin was missing P.E. It wasn't something that he thought would cross his mind at that exact moment and he knew that he didn't really miss it at all, but he felt like he'd rather be embarrassing himself in the gym rather than embarrassing himself by talking to some stupid counselor because his actions would die out after a while but his words would always be in people's minds.

It wasn't as if he had explained anything to Emily, the stupid counselor who he was forced to see instead of going to class. In the end, it had been a decision that he had made but he felt so much better talking to Jack or Vic about personal things, rather than sitting around in a stuffy room talking to some random lady about his mental health issues.

Things were minorly different this time, because he had a plan. He was going to get his meds worked out. The bell rang and he slowly walked into her room, sitting at the edge of his designated chair.

"Hi, Kellin." Emily said, sitting down behind her desk. "Anything in particular you want to talk about today?"

"Yeah," he replied, surprising her. He usually had to be forced into conversation and had disclosed almost little to information about himself to her. As a high school counselor, she had formed her own opinions and beliefs about him from how he acted and his physical appearance. "I want to deal with my medications."

"Oh?" He thought she sounded so stupid and wasn't sure why he was so angry at her but he was, maybe it was because he was angry at himself and he was always so bitter at people who he wasn't exactly comfortable with.

"Yeah."

"What medications are you taking?" She asked, giving him a judgemental look that obviously didn't believe that he had any problems.

He started listing them out, consistently fucking up the names even though he was sure about what he was saying for once, but his words sounded oddly slurred and the faint stutter that had faded off into nothingness was making a painful comeback, and all of it was causing him to be taken less seriously.

"That one's, yeah, that's for anxiety except, see-see, I don't have anxiety, I'm pretty-fairly- sure that I have PTSD, and then there's these for depression but they don't-"

"You're pretty sure that you have PTSD?" There was so much disbelief in her voice that Kellin wanted to cry because oh my god she had no idea what he had been through and he didn't want to go into details because, in all honesty, it was none of her business.

"Yes." His voice got louder, not that he wanted it to, but he felt like their conversation was too much of an argument for him not to raise his voice at least once.

"Care to explain why?" She demanded, and he stared at her with dark eyes and a clenched jaw.

"I just..." She was staring at him so intensely and for a second he wondered if he was actually serious, if any of this mattered. If he really had PTSD, because maybe he didn't deserve even that. Maybe it hadn't been bad enough and he was just making a big deal, all the panic attacks were his own fault, he couldn't sleep because he chose to, the flashbacks were just because he thought too much.

It was all his own fault.

"I got raped." It seemed like she was laughing, trying to hold back a smile, and now he just felt terrible.

"I can't prescribe you with anything."

It took just that for him to get up and walk out. He knew what he had to do.

:::::::

"You'll be fine." Vic said. Kellin wasn't sure if he believed him at all.

"It's going to be terrible." Kellin replied, pacing around the room, pretending that he wasn't vaguely worried about the state that his dirty shoes were working the carpet into. "Apparently, doctors are-"

"Kellin, there's nothing to be afraid of."

"Except for how obesity is going to kill me at twenty four. Heart attack. Stroke. Whatever. You wait and see." Vic watched Kellin go back and forth across the room, trying not to be amused by it. "There are so many side effects from being fat that I was never aware of!"

"I can go with you?" Vic offered, not really knowing what else to say. He didn't have a fear of doctors, he just found that getting any sort of medical attention in America was far too expensive and though he, as a poor student living by himself, hardly went to the doctor because he was broke, he was lucky to be physically healthy and, for the most part, mentally sound. Kellin, on the other hand, was not, and was obviously trying to get some sort of help for himself but pacing around being scared wasn't really helping him out and Vic just wanted to fix all of his problems and wipe out all of his bad memories and replace them with good ones that he could make stronger. Kellin didn't deserve what had been thrown at him, and had really been hit straight on with the majority of it. Apparently, he wasn't good at dodging.

"Yes, sure, please, thank you." Kellin stopped for a moment. "I don't think I want to know how much I weigh. I mean, I'll have to know and I'll have to face it but I know I'm over two hundred for sure, which is really very shitty, and this is just going to be a very bad day-"

"Kellin."

"How much do you weigh?" Kellin kept going, starting up his pacing again, his coming to sound more and more hysterical.

"I dunno." Vic answered.

"You do."

"Yeah, but you aren't allowed to compare yourself to me because we're different people who have been in different situations. So, I weigh six pounds. Born yesterday." Kellin glared at him, and ran a hand back through his hair.

"Seriously." It sounded pleading. Vic gave in.

"Like, a hundred thirty something or other." Kellin's face fell right in that moment. "You do realize that Jaime didn't want me to eat a lot of the time? We all weigh different things for different reasons. You're going to be fine, I promise." Kellin wasn't sure at all, but was wondering how many inspirational posters he could make with Vic's words.

We all weigh different things for different reasons.

Over the next few hours, Kellin came up with a million different scenarios of how everything could, and would, go wrong at the doctors because nothing ever did really work out for him so he didn't think that this would, either. It was the next day where he was afraid to even leave his room when he realized that maybe all of it would mix together and come out right, that he was so terrified of the doctors except that he could be helped out by them and it was terrible, anything going through his head was a mess and it had been so long since he had been able to think clearly about anything and too bright lights weren't going to help him and going to have to leave his room wasn't going to help him but at least, at least-

At least he had Vic.

The repetition of "you'll be fine," from him hadn't made him feel fine at all, but he didn't have to go alone, and maybe it would have been better, but he was too anxious and wasn't good at doing things by himself so he would sit with shaky hands next to someone who he felt so weird about and couldn't stop glancing at, because every look at Vic reminded Kellin that he would never be good enough for him.

And he hated it, the feeling of feeling so damn sorry for himself but it wasn't as though he was forcing all the self pity onto himself, it just got harder and harder to breathe every single day and he felt as though his life wasn't his own, as though he was being controlled by something else. Something that maybe was the way that the stories lied, that finding someone who genuinely actually liked him wouldn't fix all of his problems, Vic thought he was pretty but he didn't find himself attractive in any way, Vic was moving on from things that had hurt him in the past, so why couldn't Kellin?

They got off the bus and walked for a bit; Kellin became physically aware of his breathing.

"You'll be fine." Vic said when they got there. And Kellin sat next to him, twisting his hands together and tearing at his fingernails until Vic grabbed one of his hands and held it in his own. After a while, Vic laced his fingers with Kellin's. And after another, shorter, while, Kellin had to detach his hand from Vic's to follow a nurse into the awaiting pits of hell.

He had to take his shoes off before he could step on the scale, and he could feel the grooves of it directly because there were holes in his socks, so he needed new socks and he needed some new form of confidence to bring him back to working order. That confidence wouldn't arrive by looking at the scale, so he kept his eyes on the corner of the wall where the floor met it and resulted in a shadowy little right angle that wasn't a right angle because, according to his 9th grade geometry teacher, right angles all had little boxes drawn in them.

Other than that, nothing counted as a right angle.

He had forgotten all about how doctors worked, and could only pretend that he didn't notice the nurses' almost disgusted expression when she saw the scars all over his arms after she had told him to take his hoodie off so she could check his blood pressure.

The hoodie went back on after that was done, and he got to put his shoes back on. Then he had to sit in a stark room with no shadowy corners because the lights were too bright while his hands shook and mind came up with the worst possible things that could happen to him.

The doctor came in at some point, just an average looking guy, and was flipping around with some papers. Kellin wondered what was on them.

"So you're here for a reason. Do you want to tell me why you're here, or would you rather hear what I've got to say first?"

"You first," Kellin replied, knowing exactly what he was going to hear.

"You're obese. Which I'm sure you know, but it really isn't what you want to be."

"I know." It sounded so much worse in a professional person's words, and Kellin wasn't exactly excited about what else he was going to hear.

"You're 17. That's too young to be at this weight. When you're old and have nothing to be happy about in life, then you can do this to your body. Not now, though."

"I know." The doctor was then quiet, and Kellin felt as though he was compelled to say something, but didn't. There was so much he had to say to defend himself and not enough that he felt would be taken seriously, because it was all his own fault in the end, and he had to learn to deal with it.

"Have you tried to do anything to lose weight?"

"Sort of, well, yeah. I mean, I try, honestly, I- I do. But, like, yeah, some of the meds I'm on fu- mess with my head more than they do help me, which-yes, which is why I'm here. I need help with my meds."

"What are you taking?" The doctor asked, and somehow, Kellin found himself hating the guy less. Maybe his name had been stated at some point but Kellin had been too worked up inside his own head, yet now it seemed all okay because he was getting to what he was there for.

"I'm on these two for anxiety, which is useless, and one for depression which helps except it makes me feel sick and I don't even exactly to know when to take them, and I really need to fix them." The doctor wrote down the names of them and then turned his attention back to Kellin.

"Have you been diagnosed with anything?"

"Depression." They looked at each other.

"So why are you on two for anxiety?"

"Because I told them that I had it so they gave me meds for it, but I've realized that I don't. But I think I have PTSD." The doctor frowned.

"Who did you go to to get them?"

The questions continued that way, Kellin giving forced answers and wondering why he was getting so many frowns as responses. In the end, as Vic said, everything would have to be fine.

:::::::

"Hurry up," Brendon whined, stretching across Lynn's bed. Ryan was taking too long to get ready, but instead of focusing on other things that usually made other people take longer in the mornings, they were just messing with their camera. They had a camera bag with a limited amount of space in it, and had spent the whole morning polishing their lenses while simultaneously deciding which one to bring to the shoot. It wasn't a shoot, not really, it was just driving out to this spot above the redwood forest before the sun came up to take pictures of Brendon and the rest of the world.

Lynn had been out the last night, most likely doing gay things that she would never to mention and keep all to herself until the end of time. Brendon had slept over that night, and they had stayed up while having psychedelic conversations based off of what they had learned in Theory of Knowledge class, somehow, without being high. Ryan had expected to get at least an hour of sleep, but they had spent the whole night trading ideas and testing out new ones, without leaving enough time to rest before they had to leave to find a place to take pictures.

And though he might have been a little impatient and a little tired, Brendon kept finding himself so incredibly in love with Ryan and who they were. The way their hair fell around the back of their neck, the certain rasp in their voice at certain words, the faint dimples in their cheeks when they smiled big enough, the way their hands would shake after a while when they took too many pictures, the crinkles under their eyes when they smiled. So perhaps he would keep complaining about how long they were taking to get ready, but Brendon didn't mind watching them work, watching their decorated arms flip lens caps and cleaning lenses, watching the concentration in their eyes, Ryan was someone so impeccably amazing, and for the first time in god knew how long, Brendon felt nervous.

"Fine, fine. We'll go." Ryan was wearing ordinary clothes, baggy jeans, a t-shirt, and one of Lynn's black sweatshirts. They looked good, though, regardless of how messy their hair was or how shadowy the circles under their eyes were.

They were so fantastic.

Brendon was trusted with the camera bag as they boarded the hippie van, Ryan's prized possession, and started their commute. The sun wasn't even out yet, and Ryan wasn't yet caffeinated enough to be on the roads, but the streets were empty and nearly haunting, lit by the greyish cream color of the world before dawn.

Ryan looked at home behind the wheel of their hippie van, the drab colors of their clothes melting into the world around them. They came up on the Golden Gate Bridge, and Brendon knew that something was going to go horribly wrong when Ryan kept glancing irresistibly at the sky, which was rapidly changing colors.

"Ry-"

"Go." They instructed, hands shaking on the steering wheel, which jerked the van a bit. Brendon's hands messed with the camera bag unzipping the wrong parts and fumbling with the right ones, Ryan had slowed down the van, the air smelled like gasoline and tree trunks, the sky was a watercolor painting; purples and pinks mixed together, a field of flowers behind a stained glass window. Ryan was laughing, newfound energy pumped through their veins, Brendon pulled the camera out of the bag and pulled himself out of the car, the camera strap flew backwards in the wind in a way that would usually make Ryan uptight, but this time they were focused on Brendon's silhouette all sharp lines against the curves and waves of color breaking in the sky.

They were still driving, but slowly enough to get pulled over, and a loud honking came from behind the car. Laughing, Ryan suddenly sped up the vehicle and Brendon shrieked, the camera falling from his hand. Ryan's scream was filled with so much alarm that Brendon nearly dropped the camera again, and cradled it to his chest as Ryan properly sped up the car, still giggling.

"That was a good start to the morning." Ryan said after they had turned off of the main road to drive up to the redwoods. Brendon was still panting from the shock of what had just happened, and turned his face away from Ryan's.

"Are you ignoring me?" They asked, maneuvering the van between two trees. They were definitely off of any road that they were supposed to drive on and Brendon considered what the consequences would be for driving on roads that weren't roads and probably was just considered the forest.

"Are we committing an act of deforestation?" He asked Ryan, who had decided to parallel park the vehicle between two trees.

"Of course not, don't be ridiculous." They said, and snatched the camera bag off of Brendon's lap with a smile. The act on the bridge seemed to have energized them, and they bounced a bit on their feet as they started walking through the forest.

Then everything went the way it always did. Both of them fell silent except for Ryan instructing Brendon to go sit in certain places, sometimes pose in certain ways that weren't stupid at all, sometimes they had to climb trees, and sometimes Brendon had to climb them for them.

Everything seemed more bright than usual, at least to Ryan, and they stood straighter, and paid more attention to everything around them. They had developed a sort of photographer's eye over time, and knew how to focus in on the little things that just made sense to them, the things that looked photograph worthy, and these days, everything was photograph worthy.

There was nothing in the world that wasn't worthy of having a photo taken of it, because everyone had different views on everything and everyone found something beautiful in some way, maybe, Ryan just had a preference for Brendon and the way his body looked in the sunshine, in the shade, always, really, they might have just been sort of obsessed with him.

And it was the click of the shutter, the automatic way they checked the ISO, changed the lighting settings and exposure, the shifting between the viewfinder and the screen, photography was such a beautiful thing, digital or not.

All it was was taking a picture but it could be made into such an art, there were things in the world that not everyone got to see and photos could transfer that. The thing was, you didn't need talent to be a photographer. Well, it was true that skill could develop and, yeah, some photographers were better than others, but some people just knew what to take pictures of, and how to take them. It was also easy, all you needed a camera. No imagination, no creativity, none of that was really required.

Ryan loved photography. They also loved Brendon, and for a good forty minutes, both of them explored the woods in a comfortable silence while Ryan shot pictures and Brendon climbed trees and scraped his legs.

"Hey!" Brendon shouted from up in a tree, breaking the blanket of silence that was somehow stifling them.

"What?" Ryan asked, watching as he climbed down the branches, his legs dangling, arms grabbing, he looked like a long spider crawling out of its web.

"Follow me." They followed Brendon ahead, and smiled when they were lead into a small clearing full of wildflowers. The trees seemed even taller there, and Ryan felt as though they had been thrust into a Warriors cats book. Almost immediately, Brendon's thin hands started weaving together flowers into a crown while Ryan took their pictures.

"Here," he said, smiling at them as he gave them a crown that he had woven together too quickly, and just for the purpose of temporary allure. He danced the camera off of their neck and took a picture of them, half smiling and in the movement of looking away from the camera. As Ryan was about to ask for their camera back, Brendon hesitated in a way that wasn't at all like his confident self, and Ryan felt like they were sinking into a big pool of warm happiness and apprehension because they sort of maybe knew what was happening.

"So I was... wondering, a thing." Brendon began.

"You were wondering a thing?" Ryan laughed a bit, awkward, wondering if that grammar was right or wrong.

"Yeah, right, god. Um. Now I don't know how to say it." Brendon twisted his hands together and looked down at the flowers and soft grass beneath his feet. "D'you want to like..." Ryan's eyes seemed so bright. "Date?"

"Yeah," they breathed, knowing that it had been too quick of a response.

"But, like, you wouldn't be my boyfriend or girlfriend, so it's just, like..."

"Themfriend?" Ryan suggested, and instantly burst out laughing. They covered their mouth when they laughed, they always did, and Brendon grinned.

"Yeah, themfriend," he echoed, beaming at Ryan. They shook their head, the flower crown falling over. As they adjusted it, the purple and yellow flowers coming off in their hair, Brendon took another picture.

Before-and-after.


	18. Am I Pretty?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> another song by the maine i love the maine you should love the maine too.

Owning up to things was never easy, especially things that had ruined your life that you were essentially the sole source of. And in the weeks following Kellin's trip to the doctor, he had come to realize that he did, in fact, have an eating disorder. It also came to his attention late one night that he wanted to cut himself. After months of scarring his wrists and thighs as a way to learn how to deal with pain that he had no control over, he had somehow convinced himself that no, he did not have a problem with self harm, and he would not crawl back to it when he didn't have food.

He was wrong.

It wasn't a habit that was simply that easy to kick, and he felt sick to his stomach when he realized that all he could think about was the feeling of blades piercing his flesh, the sight of thin drops of blood welling up, all of it mixing together into a bloody pool of torn flesh and open skin; it hadn't happened since the suicide attempt and it wasn't helpful, it wasn't what he wanted. 

And he didn't want to remember what the feeling of cutting his skin felt like, because it was a different sort of feeling than a binge. Binges were slow. Binges took their time and binges always felt worse after, everything about them was slow. The feeling that he was doing something right came slowly and reached the peak at some point, and then the feeling of how incredibly disgusting he was slowly made its way in. Cutting was quick. It hurt, it stung, he watched the wounds bleed for a bit, he patched them up, and the pain faded after a while. It wasn't so much of a big deal.

But maybe he needed to feel it again, just to remind him of what he didn't want to feel. That was stupid. He still wanted to binge, all the time, really, except these days, things were different.

He felt a little happier, happier with life and a little happier with who he was in general. He wasn't who he had been before and would never be who he had been before, but he was so much thinner than he had been when he had shown up, god, it made him feel sick to even realize how big he had been. Slowly, his clothes had gotten less tight and he had had less nightmares, Vic began smiling more, the dark circles under his eyes faded a bit, their matching bruises disappeared. Some of Kellin's scars disappeared while some got lighter and lighter. Some stayed the same.

Everything seemed sort of brighter, sort of different, but knowing that he was getting rid of the fat that he had persuaded himself that he needed to stay safe was scary, and he had convinced himself that he needed to be ugly in his own eyes to be ugly in someone else's eyes and it was stupid, it was always stupid, he was ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. 

:::::::

Touch.

The same palm, same knuckles, same skin. Same shade. Scars. Nails. It was just a brush, he thought, it was an accident, until it took hold.

Same intentions.

"Can we talk?" Vic had never broken hold of something so fast in his life, pulled himself away from anything as though he was panicked like that, he turned and met Jaime's eyes; they hadn't spoken since the teary departure. "Neither of us was thinking right-" Jaime started, and Vic drew his hands back against his body as though Jaime was trying to steal them from him. He felt wounded.

"I don't know what you were thinking, but I know that I was thinking right. Don't touch me, don't talk to me. I'm done with you. Fuck off." It was as easy as that and Jaime's little movement gave way to a sudden fear in Vic's chest that the hand would come back and clamp around his wrist with movements as tight as handcuffs, that he would be dragged back across campus to Jaime's room with the nicotine stained ceilings, that there he would be bruised and beaten and hurt for things he hadn't meant, no, Vic had always been thinking right.

He had always been thinking right.

He wasn't the one who had done the wrong thing.

As he stormed back across campus, feeling shaky and nervous, he repeated the words over and over in his head because they made sense, at least, the way Alex had put them. Vic and Alex had fallen right back onto the path of their friendship that Vic had strayed from years ago, and it felt so right. Their conversations were the same, if not slightly matured, with new experiences to speak from.

Alex was still sad sometimes. Vic still felt like everyone was out to get him sometimes. No one ever really changed.

"Do you have a lighter?" Vic asked Kellin from the bathroom, where he was washing his hands so violently that he was certain his skin might just fall off.

"No. Why?"

"I want to light my hand on fire." It was supposed to be something vaguely humorous but it wasn't very funny, and Kellin was just confused and tired, yet his eyes still followed Vic's every movement. "Jaime grabbed me." Vic said, and resorted to pacing around the room.

"Oh."

"By my hand, right, and now I want to light it on fire." Kellin nodded because he fully understood the feeling of wanting to light his entire body on fire. 

"You know, I read a thing that says in, like, twenty years or so, all of your skin cells will have fallen off over time and new ones will come back, so in twenty years, none of the skin he has touched will still be part of you. So he'll never have touched you at all." Kellin said, watching Vic walk around the room.

Vic paused. "Shit. That's good, that's, god, you're so good." Vic said, forcing himself not to blush. Kellin didn't reply, and just kept his eyes on the ground.

"Are you good?" It had become some sort of a saying these days, the three basic words that lacked common grammar, the three words that Vic felt comfortable using when asking Kellin if he was alright.

"I want to cut." That wasn't something Kellin had ever, ever brought up before, he had always seemed apathetic about the cuts and scars all over his arms, but evidently, that was not the case.

"Oh." Vic stopped his pacing and paused in the middle of the room, frowning. "That's not good." Kellin shook his head, got up, and walked over to the dresser on his side of the room. After digging through a drawer for a while, he produced his hoodie. He had been wearing it less and less lately, which may have been due to the warmer weather, but it came across to Vic that he was caring less and less about his scars.

Kellin's question of "can we go somewhere?" overlapped with Vic's suggestion of, "let's go somewhere," and both of them smiled when they realized it. Without another word, they left the room, Kellin tugging at his sleeve and Vic rubbing at his hand.

The sun was setting and the air was warm, they walked, as they always did. At first, Kellin thought that Vic was taking him somewhere new, but he realized that they were just taking another route. It wasn't long before they ended up on the bench that they had sat on before, the one with a view of the trees and the bay and the stars, god, the stars, but right now the sunset was reflecting in the water, lighting up the world with unconventional brightness and colors that didn't belong in the sky.

They sat side by side, exactly as they had before. Vic crossed his legs and Kellin took his hand, the one he had been rubbing at so much. It was a small gesture, but Vic felt like it was something stronger, something neither of them realized meant as much as it did. 

"Why'd you start?" Vic asked, as if Kellin automatically knew what he was talking about.

"What-like..." He trailed off, his words spinning off into the dimming sky, knowing exactly what he had been asked. "I wanted, like, a way to deal with pain. Like, well. I wanted to be able to control something in my life. And..." Vic sort of leaned against him, the way he always did, and Kellin brushed his thumb along Vic's hand. "I don't know why cutting helped, but it did." Vic sighed.

"You never deserve to be sad," he mumbled, about to ask something else, but stopping. They sat in a silence that ended up with Kellin giggling a bit.

"Fine." He said and sat up a bit to take off his hoodie.

"You don't-" Vic said, but Kellin gave him the hoodie regardless.

"I'll live." They reassumed their positions with Vic melting into Kellin's huge hoodie and Kellin now tracing the scars on his arms, wishing that he could get used to the way they looked on his skin.

"Did you actually want to die when you attempted?" Everything seemed too light for a conversation this heavy, but whenever Vic and Kellin talked in their personal ways, it was never awkward. With Jack, there were odd pauses and random lapses that felt strange sometimes, they could talk, but it wasn't always as casual as it was with Vic.

"Yeah." Oh. And it wasn't like Vic had been doubting it, really, he had never met anyone who had survived their suicide attempt, and he always wondered if it had been worth it. "You know, if I hadn't attempted, I would still be back at home. Nothing would have changed. Trying to kill myself was the best thing I ever did." Oh man.

"Oh." Vic said, out loud this time. "Why did you live?" Kellin laughed a bit, and shook his head.

"Because I did it in a fucking parking lot, that's why. I was so stupid." Vic was quiet. "I binged so badly. And then, I just..." His voice faded out as he considered his words. "It hurt to move. Because I had eaten so much, and I was so out of it, and-and I just wanted to get it over with. And someone found me. Like, passed out, bleeding out. I should have died."

"I'm glad you didn't," Vic said immediately, resting his head on Kellin's shoulder. "If you had died..." His voice drifted a bit, but he brought it back. "You would have been happy, wouldn't you?" Kellin thought.

"Probably. I never knew that I would come here. Because if I hadn't even attempted, then." He stopped. "Then, jesus. Fuck." He looked across the sky. The world around them was dusky and dark, but Vic could still see the emotions showing on Kellin's face.

"Then I would have done a lot more damage."

"How?" Vic wondered out loud, not even meaning to press. "I'm sorry, sorry, I'm asking so much stuff-"

"No, I don't care. You can know. I trust you." I trust you. That was big, that was weird, Kellin wasn't one to trust people easily after what had happened. "I would probably be like... a million pounds. Okay, you know how shitty and ugly I was when I showed up?" Vic was about to interrupt and say something stupid like, "you've never been ugly," but Kellin kept going before he could get a word in. 

"See, listen, I was at my worst then. I can't even- I can't believe I even went out looking like that. For three and a half months straight, all I did was lay in bed and eat. That's it. I did nothing else. I gained-" And then he broke off, for good this time, bringing a hand to his mouth when he really realized how he had presented himself to everyone who were now his friends, to everyone who was quick to judge, to everyone, period.

The silence was okay though, it was calm, it was fine. Everything was fine. Vic breathed deeply and wound his fingers with Kellin, the good way, the way that was perfect. Kellin was good at holding hands. 

"You're so strong." Vic said.

"So are you." They sat like that for a while, Vic's head on Kellin's shoulder, their hands tight together.

"Please don't cut." Vic almost whispered, eyeing the scars along Kellin's arms.

"I won't." Kellin turned his head towards Vic, but then seemed to change his mind, and turned it back, looking at the dark expanse of trees around them.

"Please don't give up on me," he said, in an almost choked voice.

"I won't." Vic replied immediately. "I swear." He had never been more confident in his words.

:::::::: (donald trump can burn in a fiery pit in hell i wish him all of the pain and anguish and suffering in the world he's going to make my mom lose her job and he's turned my world upside down and made my family so stressed and sad again and he is actively fucking up my life and i decided to throw some of that in here. unnecessary note, but i usually don't usually like politics in my writing. i don't give a fuck when it comes to this)

"Hi." Kellin felt out of place to be in Under the Sun by himself, and him and Patrick didn't exactly talk too much, so he just stood awkwardly and hoped to god that Gee was there for once.

"Hey," Patrick said, doing what looked like lots of paperwork. "Looking for Gee?" He asked, and Kellin nodded. "She's in the back. Tell her to come back out and help me once you guys are done."

"Thanks," Kellin said, walking to the back of the store and feeling more than a bit terrified when he heard what sounded like crying. Knocking gently on the door before slowly opening it, he was greeted with the miserable sight of Gee sitting on the couch and crying her eyes out. She wasn't that loud, really, so it made sense that Patrick hadn't heard her, but now Kellin was feeling even more awkward and had absolutely no idea what to say.

"Why are you crying?" He asked outright, feeling like a child walking in on their parent crying. Gee, trying to get herself under control, wouldn't look at him. "Gee." He sat on the edge of the couch that she was on. Her navy skirt matched the fabric of it. The whole situation reminded him of ones that he had been in many times, breakdowns on ugly couches.

"Trump," she finally disclosed, wiping violently at her face.

"What did he do?" She tilted her head back and lifted her hands up to form a praying gesture that she brought down to face Kellin.

"He brought the trans bathroom law down. Gave it to states." He stared.

"We live in California." She scoffed, almost laughed.

"I'm aware! I pass! No one would question me in a women's bathroom, but me three years ago? There's no fucking way- listen, not every state is as liberal as ours. I thought we may have had a chance and there are so many trans kids out there, and now, fuck, this fucking dick is making them feel like shit, it's so fucking hard to be trans and this bathroom shit isn't helping anyone and I'm an adult now, I can wear whatever clothes I want, I can wear makeup, I legally change my name, but so many kids can't, so many kids, they just- they just- fuck!" She screamed, clenching her hands into fists. "Can I just beat you up and pretend you're him?" She asked, and got up as Kellin watched with an expression of panic as she seemed to square up with the wall.

"Gee-" He began, and then she punched the wall. Hard.

"Fuck!" She said, but calmer this time. She turned around and ran her hand through her hair. Her knuckles were scraped and red.

"Are you-"

"I'm fine." She rubbed her hand on the couch. Her knuckles weren't hurt badly, and she sunk back into the cushions as though nothing had happened. Patrick must have heard something by now. "What brings you here?"

"Are we just going to ignore-"

"Yes." Her voice was suddenly cold, and she was dead serious. "I don't want to talk about it. Why are you here?" Now that she was acting so severe, Kellin felt less comfortable with telling her what he was going to. Then she licked at one of her knuckles and made a face, which loosened the atmosphere.

"Listen, I'm sorry. I was really pissed. But I'll cry to Frank about it later, it's fine, really." Kellin nodded and pulled at the ends of his hair.

"People can still use whatever bathroom they want. There's no way to check and no way to get them in trouble, not really." Kellin pointed out.

"Yeah," she breathed. "But really, why are you here? Did something happen?" Yes, something terrible had happened.

"I think I might like, like really really like someone." Gee raised her eyebrows.

"Vic." She stated. Kellin sighed. "So...?" She asked, and Kellin shrugged.

"Is it that obvious?" He asked, hoping for an answer that he wasn't going to get.

"Yes, now, go on." Gee crossed her legs and propped her chin on her fist, looking straight at Kellin. She was almost too attentive. 

"I think, I don't know. Yesterday we were, sitting, like, talking- I wanted to kiss him." Gee was beaming. "But I didn't."

"Evidently." Kellin was quiet for a second, and then continued.

"I've never been in a real relationship before. And I'm not very good with, like, affection. Which he likes, really, he always wants to cuddle or hold my hand or hug me-"

"Oh my god." Gee stated, staring at him. "He is so into you." Kellin grimaced.

"I'm not so su-"

"Shut up!" She squealed, starting to grin again. "He is so totally into you! You must go for him."

"I don't know how to go for someone." Gee put on her thinking face and looked hard at Kellin.

"Honestly, just tell him. You guys seem like you know how to talk." Kellin continued to mess with his hair.

"I'm just. Afraid. I don't want to fuck things up and I'm fucked up and if I can't even hug him sometimes then, I don't know, what if, no, I can't-"

"Is this about sex?" Gee asked, trying to figure out what Kellin was trying to say.

"Yes, no, first, he doesn't like me the way I like him and second, my body is gross and third, I can't have sex." Kellin felt heavy and nervous and confused and just wished that Gee would come up with something revolutionary to say. "He knows what happened to me, but he doesn't know, like, how I feel about it. I still have nightmares, I can't-"

"Okay," Gee repeated, not seeming to mind that she had cut him off. "Tell him. Tell him whatever you need to tell him. All I can say is that you need to be honest about everything."

:::::::

Tay loved Kellin, and not as more than a friend, but she really did love him for all of the reasons in the world, and felt as though he was the person that she could come to when she really needed something.

Like that she really just wanted to talk to everyone about everything because there had been plenty of chaos in their lives and he had nodded and agreed right away, which had lead to all of them sitting in damp grass under a nice tree one morning, staring at each other.

"I'll start," Jack announced. "Nothing is going on with me." The rest of them nodded like they weren't expecting anything else from him, they weren't, and looked at each other for more information.

"No relationship issues...?" Ryan almost pleaded, causing Jack to laugh. He had the best laugh.

"As normal as ever. Come on, I thought we wanted this."

"Fine," Ryan said, crossing their arms. "I'm agender. We have since established this." Silence.

"My sister died." Tay said in a tiny voice.

"Fuck." Jack said almost immediately, realizing how terrible and insensitive it sounded. "I'm sorry," he added after that, watching her as if she was about to break.

"And my mom, um, she's kind of. In like, not a mental hospital, but somewhere like it, sort of. She can't take care of herself. My dad died a couple years ago and she had this breakdown, and now it's just me." They were all quiet.

"You're not alone." Kellin said, his voice shaky. Though he had wanted to have a proper talk with his friends, he wasn't exactly ready to tell them everything. Tay looked at him, her eyes full of gratitude.

"None of us are, not when we have each other. It sounds cheesy as shit but it's true, right, we can always come to each other, right?" Ryan said, looking around their little circle.

"Right." Jack put in right away, giving Kellin a look.

"Right," Kellin and Tay added in.

"We're always here for you, yeah? It's not just you, it's never just you. You're not alone." Kellin said, his voice trembling by itself.

"Thanks," she replied, her voice warm. And then it was Kellin. He took a deep, deep breath.

"There's a lot."

"There sure is," muttered Jack under his breath, and was hit by Ryan. He and Kellin made eye contact, and Jack gave the tiniest of nods.

"Right. So." They were all watching. It was okay. The air was warm, the sky was blue, the grass was green, everything was in absolute perfect order, life was the way it was meant to be. Kellin was alive, so were his friends, and that was really what mattered. "Well, y'know. Rape. Self harm. Suicide. Eating disorder. Depression. Only the best." He tore at his lip and swallowed hard. They were staring. It had been so much easier when he was crying and Vic was there. "And I'm coming to realize that I think I might, uh, like a guy." They were so quiet and Kellin couldn't make eye contact with anyone and then Jack whistled. 

God damn, Jack.

"You are so strong," he said, and he said it with so much power behind it that Kellin felt like he could maybe just melt a bit. "Ry- you know how he was ignoring me for a while, like, ages ago?"

"Yeah," Ryan said, their voice quiet.

"It was because I walked in on him right after he binged and he was so sad, and now- and now you're doing so much better, oh my god, you told me that you were gonna fix things and I was so worried but you meant it, you meant it, Kellin, you fixed things." Kellin felt like his brain had been injected with all of the emotions that made emo bands emo, and he couldn't help but tear up a bit.

Tay scooted over to his side and hugged him, hugged him as tightly as she could. His arms wound back around her, and she held so tight that he felt like he could never break again. She whispered something into his ear that no one else heard, just him, that really just turned everything upside down. Because this time, she meant it. And this time, he couldn't help but believe it.

"I love you."


	19. Andria

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> named after andria by la dispute listen i LOVE la dispute so much. there's some talk of suicide and self harm here but it's nothing really sad like usual.

"I don't understand this." Tay glanced sideways at Kellin and leaned across the table, her elbow ending up right in the middle of all of his work.

They had been studying since school had let out, at a table in the back of the library that was covered in their own highlighters, pens, sticky notes, textbooks, and pieces of paper. Kellin felt stupid because Tay was smart and was breezing through review packets as though she had the answers written on the back of her hand while Kellin stared at his notes and tried to get things through his head. It wasn't working. 

"What don't you get? That?" Tay pointed at a series of formulas in the book, and Kellin nodded. "That was back in geometry. That's easy!" She said, looking back up at him as if he had a proper answer to that. He just shrugged. "Sine, cosine, tangent. You don't remember?" He stared at her, blank faced.

"Does it seem like I remember?"

He had had math first block of the day. And while "first block of the day" classes usually resulting in students drifting off and not really learning anything of use due to being way too tired, Kellin had simply just missed the class a lot of days. It hadn't been the school that he had missed because of being in the hospital, it had just been him unable to get out of bed in the mornings. He had found a school late slip stuck in the pages of a science textbook and had photocopied it, with his mom's signature, of course, to bring into the office so that his mom wouldn't question why he had been tardy so many times.

"What, you didn't take geometry?" Tay asked, dragging the book across Kellin's papers, folding them over and wrinkling them.

"Yeah, I did, I just missed a lot of class." Ignoring that sentence, Tay bit her lip and stared at the book.

"Right, there's an acronym. Soh cah toa," she said, writing it down on the paper. "Sine, sine is opposite leg divided by hypotenuse. It's for solving triangles. Special right triangles, well, they have the forty five forty five ninety ones and then there's the thirty sixty nine-"

"Tay." Kellin interrupted, his eyes blurred from zoning out on Tay's pencil flying around his paper. "You're not explaining it well." Tay sighed.

"Here, maybe this way-"

"I'll just do science." She looked worried, unnecessarily, but didn't say anything further. She went back to her work, but left Kellin's book open on the page that she had flipped to.

He stared at it and wondered why none of it made sense to him. He wasn't good at academics. He wasn't good at anything, not really, he had never felt talented at anything but had just stuck with the idea that a talent would showcase itself later but nothing ever did, everything just got worse and he got stuck in a mindset that he would never be good at anything, ever, and that, well, those weren't good thoughts but they were the only ones he could think anymore and as he watched Tay do her work across the table, he thought.

He thought about how things had gotten better, sort of, but how his mindset had only changed from suicidal to basic hopelessness, he still wasn't happy, now he just felt sick and useless all the time. Not all the time. He couldn't say that.

He didn't feel sick and useless sometimes when he was with Vic. Like at three in the morning when Vic would sit with his back against Kellin's chest and they would both feel safe and talk about life and everything was okay, everything was a little better with Vic. Maybe it was rude to think that way and not include people like Tay and Jack who made Kellin feel happy, but under the florescent lights of the library, Kellin felt nauseous, weak, cold, and insanely stupid compared to the human across the table from him.

That was his own fault, that he had missed math class those days that hadn't been all too long ago, that all he could think were self deprecating thoughts, that he had reserved to stop eating in front of people, or at all; he slammed the textbook shut. Tay looked across the table at him, silent. She watched quietly as he packed up his things and then, almost as a last minute resort, she gathered her things together and told him to wait.

"What?" Kellin asked, his bag in his arms, his mind in the completely wrong place.

"What's wrong?" Tay asked, shoving her papers into their respective folders. Kellin paused.

"Nothing." Tay pushed everything into her bag and struggled to zip it up. Kellin watched as she crushed a decent amount of unnecessary junk papers under the zipper.

"There's always something wrong." She said, standing up.

"With me, or with everyone?"

"Both." They looked at each other. Tay's frame shrunk under the bag as she pulled it onto her back, but she stood up straight in an attempt to match Kellin's height.

"There's always something wrong with me." Kellin repeated, wondering whether or not to take it as an insult.

"There's always something wrong with everyone. What is wrong with you, right now, today?" They looked at each other, quiet, again, before Kellin turned to walk out of the library. Tay followed him, walking right at his side, pretending that she wasn't a little hurt by the way he seemed to try to be ignoring her.

"There's nothing wrong."

"Is it just because of the math?" She asked, almost desperate.

"No, it's not because of the math," he said, speeding up his pace.

"Then what is it because of?" He was headed back towards his room and Tay wasn't sure if she wanted to have a door slammed in her face. It didn't matter though, she chased him across campus, both with her feet and with her questions, and was finally confronted as Kellin reached his building.

He spun around, face red.

"I feel like shit. All the time, but today is shittier because I feel more stupid than usual. Okay?" He didn't wait for a reply and walked back to his room as Tay watched and began to understand that she hadn't done anything to make his day a better one, although maybe she could have.

She was just as stressed as Kellin was, but both of them were in different situations. He had depression and an eating disorder, she had a dead sister and a crazy mom. He had missed school because he had gotten to a point where it was impossible to even leave the house, she had found a sort of safe space in school where things only revolved around academics and her family didn't have to be a problem.

As she watched Kellin disappear into his building, she could only hope that he would be safe.

:::::::

Tay was sat in her pajamas at the lab desk, writing out how the Krebs cycle worked in full description while Kellin sat with his head so close to the table that she was sure that his head would hit it any second.

It was sometime after she had finished diagramming how glycolysis worked that Kellin properly sat up and took a sideways glance at her exam. Their terrible teacher was sitting obnoxiously, his feet on his desk, reading a book. Tay didn't want to cheat. She maybe would have looked the other way while Kellin took a quick look at her answers during a quiz, or maybe have left her Scantron too close to him during a test, but finals were a whole different story, and she gathered the papers closer to her, showing Kellin that this wasn't the right time.

He got it, he had just been desperate, and went back to his own exam, but it was clear that he was clueless. Glancing up at Mr. Jenkins, Tay's pencil strayed across the table and marked a couple of letters onto the top of Kellin's paper. "IPMATC." Quickly, she withdrew her pencil and continued her work.

That morning, before their English final, Tay had presented Kellin with a customary apple, and as he had taken it, she had caught a glimpse of gauze on his arm before he had pulled the sleeve of his hoodie back up. Of course, she hadn't mentioned it, but it had been worrying her all day, and with the added stress of finals none of it had sat well with her.

She was worried about him.

By the end of the exam, Kellin could barely hold his pencil because his hands were shaking so hard. His brain felt blank, his head hurt, he felt nauseous, and the fresh cuts on his arm stung like a burning reminder of how weak he was. Finally, the bell rang and Kellin guessed at the last few answers, feeling absolutely miserable. Him and Tay walked out of the class in silence. It was their last exam, and while Tay was relieved, Kellin just felt worse because he didn't want to receive his grades for them at all.

They stood in the hallway and watched faces pass before them.

"Wanna get something to eat? We could clean up, dress up, go downtown. Celebrate." Kellin shook his head.

"I think I'm just gonna go home. Sleep."

"Okay."

"Sorry." He honestly was, because going downtown was fun and he wanted to celebrate except he hadn't felt so devoid of energy for a long, long time, and didn't know what to do with himself.

"It's okay. Just chill out, feel better." They walked along the outdoor path and were about to part ways before Tay spoke again. "And don't do anything stupid."

Consequently, somehow, Kellin ended up doing something stupid.

It wasn't cutting, which was tempting, it was just a million times worse. He had built up a collection of food from binges that he hadn't been able to finish, and had gotten all of it out because there was absolutely no reason not to, and he just felt so incredibly empty, god, things had gotten worse and he hadn't even fucking noticed.

And he binged as though it was nothing for a while, it felt fine, it always did, it was too much food, it always was, and he didn't feel as bad, somehow, he didn't feel good either. He didn't feel anything.

And then, out of nowhere, it all hit him. The wrappers around him, the tastes in his mouth, his elevated pulse, he felt sick, he felt disgusting, he couldn't breathe, the familiar pressure on the waistband of his pants was back, he hadn't even noticed that it had disappeared in the past few weeks. Nothing ever got him anywhere, anytime he lost any weight, it would end up right back where it was, he would get bloated from binging and not care about being healthy anymore and he- had had cut again, he had told himself that he had stopped, he had convinced himself that he was done, yet he was always going back to the things that hurt him. He was shaking again, harder than ever, the wrappers around him were going to swallow him whole, and then-

Vic's hands. On his. Kellin felt like crying, like completely disappearing, his breath was shallow and rushed, his body felt like it was on fire and he felt big, so big, too big. 

"C-c-an, can you-" He stuttered out, his voice choppy and broken. Vic didn't even reply, Kellin closed his eyes and heard the wrappers around him crinkling, empty, empty, they were all empty, he had eaten everything and there had been so much of it, he had to stop. Then he felt Vic's weight on the couch beside him and opened his eyes to see Vic's serious face next to him.

And then Vic hugged him.

It was then that Kellin started crying, because Vic had pushed at the gauze on his arm and it stung and his skin felt like it was about to rip because he had eaten so much, his body felt heavy and huge, every single scar on his body felt like it was about to tear back open, he felt like he wanted to die. Again.

And he was with Vic.

It felt somehow okay to break down in Vic's arms, to hug him back like he was the only thing keeping Kellin tethered onto the real world, both of them breathed against each other as though they were sharing oxygen because there wasn't enough to go around, there wasn't enough love to go around and they were trying to make sure that each other felt happy but didn't spend enough time looking out for themselves, but at least there was someone to look out for them.

Kellin would smile at Vic at the right times, skip class to come be with him at the right times, stay up with him and promise him that he was needed at those times, he was there at the right times.

And Vic would only lock the door at the right times, not mention certain things at the right times, clean up Kellin's messes and tell the office that he was sick on the days where he couldn't get himself out of bed, he held Kellin the right way, always at the right times.

"I've got you," Vic whispered, feeling Kellin's shaking body around him. "It's okay." One of Vic's hands stayed on Kellin's back, one strayed up to tangle in his hair.

"I-I didn't mean, I didn't mean to- I don't-"

"I know, I know. You're okay. It's okay." Vic pulled back a bit, but ended up with his forehead pressed against Kellin's, their noses touching, lips nearly there. "I've got you," Vic whispered, his lips brushing ever so softly against Kellin's. That was enough to make Kellin draw back, but only slightly. Vic watched him, eyes wide.

"I'm..." Kellin began, but his voice trailed into nothing. His arms were wrapped around himself, eyes low, face sad. "...sorry."

"You're beautiful." It just came out and Vic let it, wondering if he shouldn't have. "Just, always, you are." And he would have finished it with an "I love you," but couldn't help himself to, and lapsed into silence, again. Kellin's eyes looked teary again, he looked sad and sort of small, alone, in the darkness from the drawn curtain.

"Beautiful people don't relapse," he mumbled, voice breaking again. Vic realized that he wasn't talking about the binge by the way he tugged at his sleeve, oh, no.

"Beautiful people can do absolutely anything," Vic said. "Can I see?" Kellin lifted up the edge of his sleeve, slowly, showing the patchy gauze job over the fresh cuts.

"What happened?" Vic asked, pulling a bit at the gauze. The cuts were deep.

"You were asleep, I was sad, it's okay." Kellin sounded more normal than he had a minute ago, and glanced down at the cuts with a sort of grimace. It was anything but okay. 

"Can I properly take care of that?" Vic asked. Kellin shrugged. So Vic retreated to the bathroom to get proper bandages and alcohol, the pair were experts at cleaning wounds, and wiped at the slowly oozing blood. "Why didn't you bandage them?" He asked, knowing full well that Kellin knew how to take care of cuts.

"I wanted them to hurt more." Vic cleaned them and then bandaged them, his hands gentle, his eyes roaming over the other scars on Kellin's arm. Everyone's ideas of self harm mainly included small horizontal cuts along the wrists, Vic's had been somewhat similar, but Kellin's entire arm was covered from wrist to shoulder in scars, some big, some small, some hardly there, some impossible to ignore. After Vic returned from putting the first aid shit away, he saw Kellin push himself into the corner of the couch, the way he always did.

"Are you okay?" It was a stupid question but Vic really wasn't at liberty to have anything else to ask, and he mentally cursed himself as he gently sat down at the other end of the couch.

"I just want to sleep," Kellin said, wiping at his eyes. "And not wake up anytime soon." That hurt Vic, and he sat back, feeling himself breathe.

"How about just sleep?" Vic asked, his words heavy. Kellin tilted his head to the side and brought his hand back to his face, smearing tears across his skin. "Kell." 

"I want-" he broke off when his voice cracked, and Vic watched his shoulders shake. "I want to stop hurting. I just want everything to stop."

:::::::

The next morning arrived in a blast of cold rain, grey clouds blanketing the sky and setting up a less harsh environment to wake up in. Kellin hadn't had a good night. Everything had sort of felt like one big panic attack, and both him and Vic had spent a good two hours on the bathroom floor after Vic had held Kellin's hair back as he vomited. Kellin had sat, sweaty and shaking and cold and miserable, his back against the wall, while Vic had sat opposite to him. Eventually, Kellin had been able to stand up long enough to brush his teeth, and then collapsed in his bed, not caring about the nightmares that might end up haunting him.

They ended up back on the couch, they always did, because Vic hadn't gotten any sleep and had spent far too long thinking over things that shouldn't have made him feel as torn up as they did. 

"I need to talk to you about something," Vic finally began, wondering if he would actually go through with it. 

"Okay." Vic took a deep, deep breath. This wasn't going to go well.

"I... I think I'm in love with you." Kellin stared, the circles under his eyes dark. "I, I am, really. I love you." Kellin turned his eyes back to the couch, and let out a shaky breath.

"Oh."

Vic didn't know if it had been the reaction that he wanted.

"Oh?" He was almost desperate for a reply, knowing that it had been something he had sprung on Kellin but man, he just wanted to know how he felt.

"Okay." Kellin said, staring at a seam in the couch. "Um." Vic felt his face heat up because of course Kellin didn't feel the same. Of course not, of course, there had been no reason to, now it was awkward, no, Vic had just ruined everything and the sinking feeling in his chest almost dragged his heart down to his feet, he felt as though everything had just stopped.

"I." Kellin closed his eyes. Swallowed. "I had told myself that I couldn't like guys. Because, a guy had. If a guy had-had... then I couldn't like guys, that's just fucked up." He laughed. "But I like you." Maybe the world hadn't stopped completely. "And I'm scared, because I think I'm becoming okay with that." Vic sat, quiet, having no idea what to say anymore. Kellin seemed like he wanted to say more but couldn't, and opened his eyes to show Vic that there were tears barely gleaming in them. Vic took one of his hands again, passing his fingers through his own.

"I mean, if you want we could, like. Be boyfriends." And there was that terrible nagging in the back of Vic's head, the silent scream of "why are you always looking for someone to validate you why do you always need to be attached to someone why are you doing this don't you know this is going to end up in you getting hurt," but Kellin's hesitant smile seemed to drown all of that out. 

"Sure." Quiet. "Why do you like me?"

"I get the twisty feeling in my stomach when I'm with you and I suppose it's because you're very pretty and very cool and I think you're amazing. Honestly." Kellin felt as though his heart was being tortured, his eyes were focused on Vic's hand that was twisted in his, he felt as though days and nights were passing before him, like time was being erased and re-written, like everything was amazing, like the previous night had never even happened.

Kellin hadn't felt love, he hadn't felt real love for his friends, not for any of his family members or his mom, who sometimes ignored him for days on end and looked at him like a disappointment, not love for the red haired boy who had been his real first time. He hadn't loved anything before, not really, especially not a living person.

At one point in his life, he had fully convinced himself that he didn't believe in love and that it was absolutely useless, it was a word that came with strings attached, something that held too much meaning and was used too freely in writing, poetry, and everyday descriptions of life. Love was so much more than what people made of it, which was why it had become overrated and meant less than it ever had.

Vic had been in love.

He had been in love with someone who had taken the word with strings attached, who had held the word over his head, brought the word back after their worst fights, used it like it would solve everything. Love wouldn't make Vic's bruises fade, love wouldn't change anything, and love hadn't changed anything. In that case, it had made things worse, because he had so quickly fallen out of love. It hadn't hurt, not even the way dreary writers put it, that falling out of love was like falling off of a cliff, or out of an airplane, or something, no, it had been quite emotionless and fairly painless, it had happened slowly but surely, until one day when Vic realized that he no longer saw anything he loved in Jaime.

Things would have been different if Jaime hadn't shoved him that one day, but Vic had convinced himself that Kellin was not going to hurt him, not ever, and Kellin had told himself at one point that he would never cause anyone pain, not deliberately anyways, so that would have to work out in some ways.

Vic found Kellin absolutely stunning. Kellin found Vic enchanting.

"I think I love you too."


	20. Miss Atomic Bomb

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> named after miss atomic bomb by the killers what lovely and talented men

"Try this on!" Kellin was in a dressing room at some department store, Gee had earlier explained that the huge stores on sides of shopping malls were called anchor stores because they were the big stores that lots of people always went to, being miserable because Gee was insisting that he had to dress nicely for graduation.

Which was odd, yes, he was graduating. Somehow, he hadn't failed all of his tests and was managing to graduate high school, though it wasn't as though he had ever planned on going to college. Apparently, Gee had been a mess on one of her graduation days, Bay Ridge had a collection of odd things that involved graduating, like the ceremony with the capes and ugly hats, and the ceremony where people dressed up, and the other one that just involved people in the grade, whatever it was, Gee was still beating herself up for not wearing a dress and looking "bomb as fuck," at her graduation, and was taking out her regret on Kellin, who had initially been planning on wearing jeans and a t-shirt, because that was the kind of person he was.

How he had gotten into the mess, Kellin wasn't exactly sure, but he knew that he didn't like anything that Gee was throwing over the door to him, and he knew with an absolute certainty that he did not look good in anything, really, not button down shirts or weird suit jackets or anything fancy, he especially didn't look good in things like that. And Gee Way had convinced herself that she was going to force him into something that she liked and made him want to throw up. There was nothing he enjoyed more than shopping with someone who considered herself the fashion queen of the universe. 

He threw the pair of pants that Gee had, moments ago, thrown over to him back over the door and heard Gee's indignant screech from the other side of the door.

"They're horrible!" He said, imagining the look on Gee's face.

"They're great!" She protested, pushing them back over the door. "You think everything is horrible," she continued, her voice taking on the nagging tone that it often fell to.

"They won't fit." Kellin used his next excuse and eyed the pants again, hating them with all of his being.

"You haven't tried them on!" Gee protested, telling the absolute truth. "Try them on. I'm going to find you a jacket." Kellin sighed and listened to her shoes click away. He fought with them for perhaps a grand total of five seconds, and gave up because the waist was too small. He put his normal pants back on and was about to go find Gee and protest that he was tired and was about to pass out because shopping had odd effects on him, he must have been born with a weakness in that regard, but stopped when he saw her heading right towards him, covered in hangers of all sorts, walking with a purpose.

Never mind.

"You get right back in there, I've got you a respectable outfit. Even better than the last one." Kellin didn't believe a word of it, but was shoved back into the dressing room with the collection of clothes.

"I'll wait." Gee said from outside, and Kellin gave a loud sigh that did nothing to change her opinion on anything. He changed quickly and stared at himself in the mirror with a frown practically frozen on his face. "Opinions?" She called, banging on the door as if she was afraid that he'd just disappeared, which he would never mind. 

"'S fine." He said, turning around and staring at himself even harder.

"It's fine?" Came Gee's shrieking voice, and the banging on the door got a little more frantic. "Let me see!" Kellin opened the door and met her eyes, his own looking almost confused. Her squeal was completely unnecessary, but it made Kellin want to smile, and she brought her elegant hands to her face with the trademark surprised look going on, man, she put too much of her energy into shopping. 

"You're wearing it." She announced, jumping up and down a bit. "You look good!" Kellin sighed. "Do you feel good?" She asked, coming to realize that she wasn't getting any responses.

"It's fine." He repeated, picking at the shirt. Gee's energy seemed to wane for a bit as she came up with realizations in her mind, and she smiled slyly at Kellin.

"You know that you look really damn good." Kellin shut the changing room door before she could see him smile.

:::::::

"Are you ready to go?" Vic hadn't seen the ensemble that Gee had forced on Kellin, and he was anxiously pacing around their room because it was graduation and the graduating part wasn't the scary part, it was the fact that Vic's family might show up. Not his dad, well, he hoped not his dad, but he was nervous about seeing his mom and his brother, which wasn't really something to be nervous about, but he hadn't seem them in years and was scared about it. He wanted reassurance and he wanted Kellin and he knew that Kellin was anxious too but it was all about different things, Vic just wanted to get out of the room but with Kellin, he just wanted to be with Kellin.

Finally, Kellin opened the bathroom door after about thirty minutes of him trying to figure out how to make himself look as not ugly as possible. He hadn't achieved much. Vic turned and smiled immediately, the smile bloomed on his face like flowers in the springtime, bright. Grateful. 

"Nice." Vic said, his tongue sticking out a bit, the way it always did when he grinned.

"We can go," Kellin said, quiet. Vic held out his hand and Kellin took it, pretending that he didn't hesitate as they left the room, pretending that he wouldn't much rather spend the day lying in bed wearing jeans and a hoodie and not some button down shirt that made him look stupid, maybe, if he wanted to talk about something stupid he could have brought up Vic's bowtie but both of them knew that it would make Jenna laugh and anything that made Jenna laugh was basically everything but still, it was a good thing. Laughter was never bad. 

The ceremony was being held in a field type of place that was just on the edge of the school's grounds. As they approached the entrance to where all the chairs and stage was set up, Vic turned back on his steps and took a deep breath, bringing his shaking hands up to mess with his hair.

"What's wrong?" Asked Kellin, just worried enough for his voice to take on a little tremor of its own.

"My mom is here. With my brother." Kellin had no idea about anything involving Vic's family except for the fact that his dad had hurt all of them and that's why he was here and that's why he was guilty, leaving his mom and brother back with his dad.

"Okay." Kellin said. "It's okay."

"It's okay." Vic echoed, breathing. "Okay." And he turned back around as if with some newfound pride, and squeezed Kellin's hand tight as they walked back towards the entrance. He watched as Vic sped up when he reached his family and hugged his brother, who was honestly very scary looking. Kellin hung awkwardly behind Vic, not knowing what to do or say and making very awkward eye contact with his brother, who kept his chin tilted up in that way, that intimidating way. Vic's mom had very platinum blonde hair that was cut in a very unfortunate way, and was chattering very loudly at her son.

Vic sort of stepped back at a point and reclaimed Kellin's hand, holding it tightly.

"Mom," he said, stopping the steady flow of words coming from her mouth. She seemed like a very energetic person and talked with her hands, which stopped their erratic movements when Vic cut her off.

"This is Kellin. He's my boyfriend." Boyfriend sounded so odd and so real, and Vic's brother crossed his arms over his chest. Vic's mom started shrieking again, hands fluttering all over, and Vic's brother scowled.

"This is Mike, and Mike..." Vic gestured around between his brother and Kellin. Mike nodded and looked threatening. Vic's mom starting talking again, throwing questions both at Vic, Kellin, and Mike, none of whom seemed keen to answer except for Vic, though hesitant. They all started walking again, with Vic and his mom in front and Kellin awkwardly hoping that Mike would just leave him alone until he could find someone to hang on to for the rest of the day.

No such thing happened.

"So you're his boyfriend, then?" Mike asked, his voice low. He had a piercing right above his lip and a ring right in the middle, which no one can pull off, and seemed very extremely hostile.

"Yeah," Kellin said, glancing around to find some excuse for him to duck out of the conversation. 

"Listen to me, right? If you do so much as look at him the wrong way, I'll know. I'll cut off your balls and shove them down the bloody remnants of your neck, I'll cover your legs in acid and set the rest of you on fire, then I'll toss some salt on you, throw you in some cement and toss you to the bottom of the Pacific fucking Ocean. You treat him like gold." Kellin paused, eyes low, wondering how on earth he was meant to reply to that.

"I won't do anything."

"You promise?" And it was that choice of words that made Mike seem so much more innocent, more like a worried little brother than a scary old one, it was as though he might ask Kellin to pinky swear and make sure that he wasn't crossing his fingers; Mike realized his mistake but kept his semi angry apathetic attitude about him.

"Yeah. I promise." Mike nodded and seemed to remove his attention from the topic.

"You seem like an alright guy, I just don't want Vic getting hurt anymore. I don't want him fucking off with some stupid guy who just wants to use him and ends up being a total asshole who can't think for himself and just likes blaming other people for his own problems and-"

"Which isn't me," Kellin interrupted. Mike scowled at him.

"I'd hope not."

:::::::

Tay's mom had come and Jenna wasn't a fan of her so she had decided to spend the day with Kellin, proving to be a very clingy person who did enough talking to make up for Kellin's apparent lack of speech. They had found seats but hadn't found their other friends, and Jenna had talked through the entire speech of the principal, asking Kellin random questions about his life, blabbering on about Tay, and wondering aloud perhaps six times what they were going to do that night.

"What's your middle name?" She asked, almost sitting on the ground because she examining how many threads his pants had from the knee down because, she had said, it was awkward to stare intently at a guy's crotch.

"Quinn," Kellin said, and watched as Jenna looked around and sat down on the grass to get a better look at his ankle.

"What's your last name?"

"Well..."

"What is it?" 

"Quinn..."

"Kellin Quinn Quinn?" And she started laughing, like she always did. Kellin didn't know who the people sitting next to them were or which student they belonged to, but it seemed as though the whole entire family had flown out from the depths of the earth because they were all wearing puke yellow matching shirts, and the two closest to Jenna frowned at her as she laughed out loud while the principal, who had been talking for quite some time, started crying up onstage.

"What's your real last name?"

"I don't like to use it."

"But what is it?"

"Shh!" One of the people near them instructed, while Jenna finished her counting and sat back in the metal fold out chair. She glared at the person who had shushed her and turned back to Kellin.

"I'm going to hear it when they call your name." She stated, all matter of fact.

"Then wait." Jenna looked like she was going to protest, but didn't seem to find a reason to.

"Fine."

"How many threads are there?" Kellin asked. Someone had brought the principal a handkerchief to blow his nose with, and he did so right in front of the whole senior class and their families.

"Ninety six. Well made stuff." Kellin smiled a bit, and Jenna said "Quinn Quinn" under her breath and the principal made a honking sound as he blew his nose which made both of them start giggling even harder.

Finally, they started calling people up. Their school had two of the diploma ceremonies but one was different and had everyone line up next to the stage and wear caps and gowns and had another one where all of the family came and people could dress how they wanted and the school was just so stupid but there he was, about to walk up in front of everyone, jesus fuck he wished that he wasn't there.

"What letter does it start with?" Jenna asked, not realizing that Kellin was paling as they got closer and closer to his name.

"B- Jenna, what if I do something stupid on stage?" It took Jenna one look to realize that he was panicking. "Every single person is going to see me-"

"Don't be stupid, no one cares about you unless they know you. You look fine, just take their diploma, shake some hands, and get off stage. You're perfectly fine."

"Kellin Bostwick!" The name came and Jenna looked up at him, her eyes bright, face smiling.

"Bostwick. You'll be great." He stumbled up the stairs of the stage and pretended to ignore the whoops and hollers coming from different places in the crowd, but his smile gave him away.

He took his diploma and shook the hands of all the people that he was supposed to, only recognizing who the principal was.

He took a glance at the crowd as he walked offstage, and saw that Jack was standing up and clapping obnoxiously while hollering and yelling. When he saw that Kellin saw him, he started laughing through his screams. Kellin tried as fast as he could to get offstage.

As he was on his way back to his seat, Kellin stopped in the aisle when he saw a face that he really, really didn't want to see. They made eye contact, she stood up, and he went all the way back down the aisle, ignoring Jack's whispered screams of his name. 

Fuck.

"Kellin!" She was behind him and he had no idea where to go or what to do, it was surprising how seeing certain people could totally ruin a day. "Kellin, please." So he stopped and turned around because dammit, he had some things to say.

"What the fuck are you doing here?" He demanded, his hands shaking again. And he had never liked anger, he didn't want to scream but oh my god he hated her, he absolutely loathed her and there she was, ruining this day that was for him, he was meant to be proud of himself for making it through this year but there she was, ruining everything. She always did. 

"I wanted to see you graduate! I'm your mother, don't I have that right?"

"After what you did, do you really have that right?"

"I don't know what I did!" She exclaimed, throwing her hands up in the air. "I didn't do anything!" Kellin dragged a hand back through his hair and stared at her, wondering how she could be that incredibly ignorant.

"You ignored- you, you ignored everything that happened, you pretended that none of it even-you didn't want it to be true, it was true, it still is-"

"Are you still mad about that? Can't you put that behind you?" Kellin had never felt so much anger for someone in his entire life, and he had no idea what to do with himself. Maybe punching a wall like Gee had would help him out. He took a deep breath.

"I cannot believe you. If that's all you think that I think about then you're wrong, but I don't think you understand that it ruined me. I wasn't looking to you for help, I was looking for anyone. And you said that it was the meds and that no such thing had happened and you sent me here, fuck, kicking me out was the best thing you ever fucking did for me. You're not my mother. I don't want your money. I don't want anything from you again." He took his phone out of his pocket and tossed it at her, watching her fumble with it. "Anything you've bought for me, you're getting it all back. You shouldn't have fucking come."

And he stepped around her to make his way back to where Jack was.

:::::::

"D'you want a hit?" They were sitting at Alamo Square Park at three in the morning, smoking weed and discussing what they were going to do over the summer.

Them included Brendon, Ryan, Jack, Alex, Jenna, and Kellin. Vic and Tay were off with their families so Jenna and Kellin were temporarily their own couple.

"Sure," Kellin said, taking the blunt from Brendon, who lay back contentedly. Although Kellin wasn't one for alcohol, he had never minded weed.

Weed was fine.

Everything was fine.

His mind felt softened, the world felt warm and fuzzy, and things seemed very perfectly okay. Except that Vic wasn't there. That was alright though, because he was with his family, and family was especially important when they weren't there to fuck with you.

"We should go on a road trip," Alex said, breathing in the secondhand smoke from their pot. "LA, sand dunes, the coast. San Diego, if we want. Take the van." They all sat in comfortable silence. Brendon was drawing on Ryan's leg.

"Yeah," Ryan finally said. "We can." Brendon's pen was tracing designs onto their leg. "Early tomorrow."

"It is tomorrow," Kellin pointed out, coughing a bit and handing the joint to Jenna, who took a long drag. Ryan laughed, a weird, very giggly laugh.

"It sure is." The stars were bright, really bright. The whole city skyline glowed in their view, but outer space seemed to be more of what Kellin was interested in.

He was okay. Happy.

He wasn't forcing himself to feel anything of the sort, he was just overwhelmed with the feeling and maybe it was the drugs or maybe it was the fact that he was done, he had just graduated, he was about to start something that didn't revolve around him not being smart and not being able to deal with his problems. They would do their road trip, if they were even serious, and then it was all real life for him. He wasn't a helpless kid anymore, he had cut off the toxic people, he was his own person now, his own responsibility, he was in charge of his own fucking life.

Kellin had relapsed, but it hadn't affected him as much as it would have, say, three months ago. Kellin had had some bad fucking days, Kellin had barely made it through his exams, Kellin had barely made it out of junior year alive. But there he was. San Francisco. Alamo Square. Weed. Friends. Talk. Lights. 

Alive.


	21. California Kids

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> named after california kids by weezer i love weezer i say i love everyone but i do really i love weezer

"Hey."

Vic was sitting cross legged on his bed, watching the clock flash 4:00 in neon red letters at him. The night had swallowed him whole, his body felt emotionless, almost hollow. He had sat hunched over in that way for two hours, his mind going places that it had barely returned from, his body hadn't moved. It had been an odd sort of breakdown, a realization, something that should have made him happy, freedom was his and all he could do was overthink it; he wanted Kellin.

And Kellin crept back into the room at four o'clock in the morning smelling like nighttime and marijuana, he was coming down from his high and fairly right in the head, enough to realize that Vic wasn't asleep and that Vic wasn't acting normal.

"Did your family go?" He asked, sitting down in front of Vic on the bed.

"Yeah," Vic breathed, his eyes blankly following Kellin. "My dad didn't want them gone for so long." Kellin took Vic's hand and held it in his own. Vic looked at Kellin for a long while in silence, his eyes sad, silent.

"We're done," he said, finally. "With school." Kellin nodded, rubbed at Vic's hand. Both of them had very different attitudes about it that could be shared if they had the words to come to a common conclusion, but both were rightfully overwhelmed, and one of them had gotten rid of the worry by smoking weed while the other had spent the night thinking about every single aspect of the future and how he didn't want to leave Kellin.

"It's just us now," Vic said, his voice shaky. He had applied to colleges, of course, in the haze of junior year he had taken the SAT once because he hadn't had the sixty dollars to take it again and gotten absolutely average scores, he didn't want to be average. He didn't know what he was going to do.

"But we have each other." Kellin said, moving closer to Vic. He seemed almost confident, warm, happy. Different. 

"Do we? Are you going to leave? Where are you going to go? Where am I going to go? What are we going to do-college? Jobs? Careers? Are we going to have each other, really? How long is that going-"

"Vic," Kellin said, cutting him off. "You have to live right now. You have to." He was sincere now, nothing was a joke. "If you get your head stuck in the past or the future then you're going to miss every single beautiful thing going on in the present. We have the summer. We have our time. I'm not going to leave you. I have nowhere to go except somewhere with you. The only place I want to be is somewhere with you. Live now. We'll worry about the future when it catches up to us, but we'll worry about it together."

It sounded staged. It sounded like he had written it out beforehand, like he had come up with it days before, but he was coming up with it all at once, beautiful words for a beautiful person, and they calmed Vic down.

"Do you want to go on a road trip with us?" Kellin asked, and Vic smiled.

"Yeah."

"We're leaving later. Today." Kellin giggled. "It's so weird how time works." Vic loved the smile on Kellin's face, Vic loved the way he talked, the way his voice sounded, the way his eyes looked in the dim light, the way he moved, the way he looked, the way he smelled, like weed and the wind and flowers that didn't have a smell, that was Kellin's smell. All he had needed was Kellin, a few words had been exchanged back and forth and there, suddenly, everything was okay again.

"Okay," Vic whispered, pulling himself close to Kellin, their faces close, skin nearly touching.

"Okay," Kellin replied, pressing his lips against Vic's, feeling Vic's hand come around to hold the side of his face, feeling the other boy's heart beating, feeling his lips pull and push back against his, feeling Vic's hand tangle through his hair, feeling himself pull back after an instant, pressing his fingers to his lips, shocked.

He was on fire.

Vic had gotten struck by lightning, and while he sat, absolutely shocked, Kellin burned away. Both of them were in dire need of an ambulance. Maybe that ambulance was the next kiss, brought on by another and another until they were making out, really, the air felt hot and tense and dark and sensual, Vic was half on top of Kellin, his body curving, hands moving, fuck, that-

Was enough.

Kellin rolled off of the bed, pulling his hands back through his hair, catching the breath that Vic had stolen. He wasn't sure what had done it, but the fire had been put out and he had been taken back to other times that he didn't want to, fuck, he was never going to be the way he had been before.

"I'm sorry," Vic said right away, adjusting his shirt, fixing his hair, not knowing what to do with his hands or even the rest of himself.

"Don't apologize," said Kellin, turning circles in the room. He licked his lips. Tasted Vic on them. "We should sleep, we have to leave tom-today. Later." He laughed again as if nothing had happened, like they were still stuck in the conversation that they had lapsed into before Kellin had kissed Vic, he had done it, he had initiated it so it was all his fault.

"You were serious? About the trip?"

"Yeah. We're going down the coast. In the van. Ryan's."

"Oh." And they didn't speak much for the rest of the night, but Kellin lay down in Vic's bed as though it was his, they curled tight together and pretended that there was space but that didn't matter, it never had, they always wanted to be close. Because maybe if they were close enough then maybe neither of them would ever have to leave, that sometime they would just stick, that they would end up like the people they watched be happy, like they could end up like Gee and Frank with their coffee and records, like Patrick and Pete with their knitting and cooking, like Jack and Alex with their guitars and glow sticks and kisses and smiles and sex, sex, jesus, wasn't that part of a relationship? Sex? That's what people always wanted, that's what was always debated about, sex, sex, sex-

"I can't have sex." Vic was braiding a thin piece of Kellin's hair, his fingers lazy and tired.

"I know."

"Not now, at least."

"I know." Again. "You can have a relationship without sex." Vic curled himself tighter to Kellin, arms around his soft body, breath on the back of his neck. "You're perfect."

:::::::

Kellin hadn't been kidding about the trip. 

There was a terribly loud knocking at their door at a time around eight in the morning, coming from the best door knocker of his time, Jack Barakat.

"Kellin! Vic! We've gotta go!" He called, pounding his fist even harder against the door. "Come on!" Vic stumbled to the door and opened it while rubbing his eyes, hair matted and messy. Jack stared at him, confused. "Did Kellin not tell you?"

"I didn't get..." Vic stopped his sentence to yawn, "a time. Just the information."

"Well, we're leaving at eight thirty. Get your shit ready. Meet us in the parking lot." And then he disappeared, leaving Vic to walk back into his room and look around, wondering what exactly Jack meant by "getting his shit ready." So he woke up Kellin, who was most likely not even asleep and just lying under the blankets, and stared at him-just. He was too pretty but not in the way that Vic would want him to be less pretty, it was just a bit overwhelming sometimes because, just, jesus.

"What do we need to bring?" Asked Vic, looking around the room. "Pillows?"

"Yes," Kellin said, grabbing the pillows off of his bed. "Pillows. Blankets-"

"Money."

"Money."

"Clothes?"

"Probably." They gathered their things, shoved what they could into a bag of Vic's, carried their pillows and blankets in their arms. Vic looked around for a moment before walking into the bathroom and coming back with Kellin's translucent pill bottles.

"Nice try." And then they went. They were early, and only Ryan and Jack were there, Jack dumping illegal gasoline into the gas tank while Ryan wiped down the windshield.

"Brendon and Ryan are in the front, Alex and I are next. Take your pick." Vic knew that Jenna and Tay would get the next seat back and he and Kellin would get the large back of the trunk immediately, and he beamed at Jack before proceeding to dump all their things in the back.

The rest of them arrived in due time, all before Jack's deadline of eight thirty, and Brendon started their drive while some of them slept, some organized, some talked, some just looked out the window and watched the clouds pass over the trees while Fitz and the Tantrums blasted in the background, the California sunshine filtering in through the dusty windows; things would be okay, they always were.

The day seemed to pass by before them in odd parts, Ryan often forced Brendon to pull over at scenic points to take pictures; they were filming the whole trip for a "film project" that they had started. At some point around four, Ryan was driving at this point, Brendon messing with their camera. Vic and Kellin had climbed out of the back to sit in the main part of the van, Kellin between the bump of the tire and the doors, Vic taking Jack's place next to Alex so Jack could show them how to play a ridiculous game he had thought of to pass the time until they found somewhere cool to stop.

That might have been the best part of it all, being able to do whatever they wanted. Of course, laws were still in place, but it almost felt as though they were in a different universe as they drove down the PCH. Ryan, who was in charge of the music, was blasting whatever felt necessary, and had been playing Ice Ice Baby and Under Pressure on and off to see who could guess which one was which by the identical beginnings. 

It was odd how much the rest of them had seemed to identify with the state after only living in it for a few years at most. To Ryan and Brendon, it was essentially the same as Nevada except with more hippies and more ocean. To Kellin, it felt like Oregon but warmer, with less hippies and better beaches. Hailing from the East Coast, Jack, Alex, and Tay had a whole different opinion on it. According to all three of them, everyone over there absolutely worshipped the West Coast and despite how much anyone claimed to love their state or city, they all desperately wanted to move west. Jenna was the only non-American with them, and still truly believed that Australia was better in every single way than the United States.

No one ever fought with her on that.

Jack was trying to teach them a weird form of "never have I ever" that didn't have to involve whoever was bringing up the topic not doing anything. Really, it was about who had done something. Because they were too lazy to count out on fingers, they were using Jenna's cereal pieces.

"Never have I ever..." Tay trailed off, staring into the cereal-y depths of their van. "Honestly and truly and seriously thought that I would seriously actually kill someone if I had the chance. For real." Kellin took a piece without hesitation, and everyone watched him as though he was a convicted murderer.

"Damn." Said Brendon. He was hanging over the passenger's chair, not playing, but watching. Kellin just shrugged and collected his cereal pieces together.

"Never have I ever thrown up on someone," he said, watching as both Jenna and Tay snatched pieces out of the pile, and Alex asked if it counted if it had happened as a little kid.

They continued playing, and Kellin sat back and watched the world flash by in the windows behind Jack. Trees blended into the blue sky, and everything carried an "alright" hue with it, a light that shone differently in the darker months of the year rather than June, although Kellin had never been a big fan of the summer.

The last good summer he had had was the one before sophomore year of high school. It had mainly been spent by the big lake where him and his friends had jumped off of docks and watched the sun rise and talked about things that had never been brought up otherwise. They talked about problems in their family, being gay, being sad, being all sorts of things, life had seemed so welcoming back then. Kellin had believed that though he didn't excel at anything, there were still endless possibilities. His first time had been down by the lake with a red haired boy whom he had felt truly in love with. Love for one night.

And then things had changed. He had spent the previous summer in bed, the blinds in his room drawn; there had been a carpet of food packets across his floor, and a steady layer of empty wrappers and boxes had piled up next to his bed. He didn't shower, didn't leave the house once, and was absolutely positively miserable.

Maybe this summer would change things.

"Aha!" Ryan's triumphant yell broke through his thoughts, and he distractedly gave his cereal to pieces to Jenna when she asked for them. He hadn't been planning on eating them anyways. It was later in the day, around five or six at that point, and Ryan had found a really dumpy looking restaurant with a sign outside that had a huge sunflower and the words "VEGETARIAN RESTAURANT!!" printed beneath it.

Jack had complained about how much he liked meat in his mouth while Alex blushed and told him to shut up, but they all got out of the van because it was nice to stretch their legs, and they were hungry. Kellin told Vic to go on without him and climbed back into his and Vic's designated part of the van and dug around, looking for his meds. When he found the bottle, he turned around to find something to drink with them, and found Brendon hanging over the back of the chair, arms dangling down.

"Hi." He said.

"Hi," Kellin replied, finding a half empty iced tea bottle that would just have to work for him.

"Um. I was wondering if, well, if I could do something," Brendon began, sitting up properly, though backwards, on the chair.

"Yeah?" Kellin asked, prying open the pill bottle.

"You can always say no, I mean, I don't know if you'll want to, I was just wanting to try-"

"What is it?" Brendon hesitated, as if he didn't know how to say it.

"I was wondering if I could like give you. It's not a tattoo, it'll leave, it's not like a needle or anything, it's ink but it stays- but like, using your-uh- scars to like, make. The design." That was it? Brendon had made it more awkward than necessary, and was twisting his fingers together nervously.

"Yeah, sure." Kellin swallowed a pill.

"Really?" Brendon asked, perking up.

"Yeah, what are you gonna do?"

"Do you want like, flowers or space?"

"Flowers."

"Nice."

:::::::

"There's a Goodwill down the street," Tay said, and Kellin didn't pick up on whatever she was trying to get at. Her, Jack, and Kellin were out on the curb, finishing their vegetarian sandwiches and watching the end of the rainstorm that had brushed over them head out to sea. The sun was low in the sky, and the rain created reflecting puddles in the parking lot.

"And?" Kellin asked, picking up the words that Jack was too lazy to ask. He had seemed quieter lately, and almost had a sad vibe going if one paid enough attention. Everyone else was still inside, pooling their money together and looking at road maps, things that none of the three people outside were interested in.

"I want to see if they've got anything good. Board shorts, maybe. We are going to the beach." Kellin was dreading the beach. Despite the heat and the obvious summer weather, he had stuck to his dark, baggy jeans for as long as he could, and wasn't going to get rid of them anytime soon. He really had nothing else to wear except for the jeans anyways, and it wasn't like he was going to find anything that fit him and was respectable to wear at stores around them. Californians were thin. He would fare better in Alabama.

So they followed Tay to the Goodwill and hung around, sticking to a certain wall that was painted bright, fresh, blue. Jack leaned into the corner, his back hunched, eyes tired.

"What's wrong?" Kellin asked it, Tay was looking at whatever she was there for, and there seemed no better time to ask. Jack shrugged. Something was holding him back.

"'M not sure if I want to be dating Alex."

"What?" Kellin felt as though he hadn't heard Jack, and watched as his friend turned, running his hands back through his hair.

"I love him, I've- I..." He trailed off, voice choked. "Can we talk about it later?"

"Yeah." Tay interrupted their quiet sadness with a shout, wanting Jack to try on a certain hat. He wouldn't meet Kellin's eyes.

Brendon would, though, and Kellin found himself enjoying his company more than he would have realized before, he had barely spent any time with Brendon, ever. Of course, Ryan had sung their countless praises about him, but Kellin was now coming to realize that he was, in fact, quite cool.

There was a sort of vibe that he had going on, something calm and reassuring, something that made Kellin feel less awkward, less ridiculous, less like someone who shouldn't exist.

They had driven a little further and found a lot they could park the van in near an entrance to the beach. It had been completely empty, and Brendon and Kellin sat on the semi-dry sand that took up the midsection of the shore while Brendon inked Kellin's arm.

The sunset hadn't been anything spectacular, there had been no colors that had blown anyone away. It was like a bruise, yellows fading into soft purples. The hazy sky held the amount of light that it did right after sunset, just enough for Brendon to see what he was doing. His pen pressed against the upraised scars on Kellin's arm, drawing and tracing, creating beautiful, beautiful things on the otherwise flawed skin.

They hadn't been talking much but it wasn't odd, it was peaceful. Brendon had just asked about what Kellin wanted and told him basically what he was going to do, and they had started.

Brendon's head lowered as he brought his eyes closer to the details he was working on. "Do you think they'll ever really go away?" He didn't have to specify what "they" meant, and always seemed hesitant about the word "scars."

"I don't think so. Not the big ones." Brendon's eyes were basically touching Kellin's arm because he was so close, and sat up when he had finished. A curled rose flower bloomed above the thorny stems of the scars left over from Kellin's suicide attempt. Brendon cracked his knuckles and looked down at his work. Stems and flower bushes had been created, petals and leaves, it was all so painstakingly perfect, and Kellin could barely make out the scars.

The black ink was shocking against his pale skin, and Kellin felt a little overwhelmed when he looked at what Brendon had created.

"Thanks." He didn't know what else to say. He couldn't stop looking at it, couldn't stop turning his arm and seeing how everything carried all the way over, how the scars turned into flowers, how Brendon could have made something so stunning out of something so ugly and crude, jesus, Kellin wished to god that he could think of something more to say than thanks.

"Yeah," Brendon said. He was smiling.

The smiles died when Jack and Kellin returned to the beach later that night, when the moon reflected over the waves and all the birds had gone silent. Kellin was still in shock about what he had said earlier about Alex, and really needed an explanation. Jack sat for a while and stared out at the calm waves lapping at the shore, almost reflecting the stars above them.

"I'm not breaking up with Alex."

"Okay." Jack's eyes seemed a little too bright. Maybe the tears in his eyes were reflecting the starlight around them.

"I've considered it. A lot. And I feel terrible."

"What even- what happened?" Jack sighed, and rubbed at his face.

"I don't think- I don't. I don't know. I don't think he loves me like I love him." Kellin watched as Jack turned, not seeing the hot tears drip down his friend's face, not feeling the pain in his chest, not knowing what to do, what to say.

"Why?" Jack looked up at the sky. He wouldn't look at Kellin, not at all, and Kellin was reminded of the time that Jack had found him after a binge and had tried so hard to keep eye contact going in that conversation, god, what had happened?

"It's not that he doesn't love me, he might, he does, rather, he. He should. It just always seems like everything is about him and I feel sad sometimes, really, really-" he broke off because he was crying, really, and it wasn't right at all, something had happened, something had changed and Alex hadn't been there, no one had been there.

"Jack, I. I'm-"

"I've talked to him, I've cried to him, and it all ends up about him. I have a breakdown and then he has a panic attack because that's him, that's how he works, and I have to take care of him and anything that happened to me has been forgotten, I feel like he's not even trying!" Jack buried his face in his hands, shoulders shaking.

"Sometimes, well, mental illnesses can fuck with relationships. Sometimes both people have to be on the same level of fucked up for it to work. Sometimes they don't." Quiet. "And I'm not saying that yours doesn't, and I'm not saying that Alex has an excuse to just ignore you and I-I know that you've been patient, and you don't deserve this, it's just, sometimes it's really, really hard to think of anyone other than yourself when you're freaking out. And afterwards...." Kellin's sentence fell apart just as Jack seemed to all over again, the tears coming even harder; neither of them realizing that Alex and Vic had been having their own conversation and had stopped to listen when Jack had started raising his voice.

And it all ended up with Alex pulling Jack away with his words and an apology, they left Kellin and Vic standing there, knowing that somehow, very clearly, everything was going to be okay. 

:::::::

"I'm really happy." The whispered words seemed almost deafening in the otherwise silent van, and Vic gazed up at Kellin, his face breaking into a grin. 

"I'm happy that you're happy." Kellin was sat between the wall of the van and the back of Jenna and Tay's chair, bench, designated area- whatever. Vic was lying across him with his head in his lap. It was dark, it was late, and both of them had spent the night whispering deep conversation to each other until they had fallen silent to, perhaps, fall asleep. And then Kellin had said something that he never thought he ever would again. I'm really happy. 

"I think. I don't know." Vic lifted a tired hand over his face and laughed, covering his mouth to stop himself from waking up Jenna and Tay. "I think I just really love you." 

And that was perfectly enough.


	22. Flicker, Fade

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> last chapter y'all again this is also up on my wattpad (@demolitioniero) it's got a nice cover and shit on there. thanks for reading if you did much appreciated sorry for all the angst. this chapter is named after the inspiration for this story: flicker, fade by taking back sunday

Early morning, cold breath. They walked down to a lake as the sun rose. Just like the previous night, there weren't any special colors that came with it. There didn't have to be. Apparently, Jenna and Tay had found the lake the previous night while exploring. Ryan and Brendon were asleep in the van. No one was sure if Jack and Alex had ever come back.

Vic was holding Kellin's hand, but in a way that was too tentative and a little nervous. Kellin was always distant in the mornings, Vic didn't know why, but he didn't like talking, or touching, until he had been awake for at least an hour and a half. 

"Here we are!" Jenna's voice echoed around and she giggled, looking around. A fine mist was hanging around the sky, as though pretending that the sun wouldn't burn it away as the day warmed. The lake was huge, the sides of it ringed with pine trees and rocks that stretched up high. Tay thought it looked like the lake from Stranger Things where Mike Wheeler had almost died. 

Jenna was excited, as always, and immediately chucked her shoes off onto the shore and wasted no time in jumping into the water, the splash disturbing the eerie reflection that the water made of the rocks and trees around it.

"Damn!" She screamed, laughing and shaking her wet hair. "It's cold!" Tay got in right after her, and Vic and Kellin resorted to go climbing on rocks. Neither of them had any clothes that they were willing to get wet, and responsibly, didn't have any swim trunks either. Admittedly, no one had been readily prepared for the trip.

The rocks were good climbing material, and Kellin and Vic climbed higher and higher until Vic had confessed that he may or may not have minor vertigo, so they stopped. Kellin sat down at the edge of the rock, feet over the edge, while Vic watched from a distance and hoped that neither of them would randomly fall over the edge. 

Tay and Jenna's laughs and splashes echoed up the stone walls surrounding the cliffs, and Vic finally sat down next to Kellin, instinctively reaching for his hand but only watching Kellin pull his hand away.

"What's wrong?" Vic asked immediately, wondering if he was allowed to feel a little hurt. 

"Nothing. I don't know." Kellin swung his legs over the edge and Vic gasped a little, latching himself onto Kellin's arm. Brendon's designs were dark against his pale skin, and disguised the scars that Vic could still feel. So could Kellin. And Vic let go, not wanting to, and moved himself a little further back from the edge of the cliff.

"Either let me hold your hand or stop swinging your legs." He instructed, nervous. Kellin stopped swinging his legs. It was quiet. 

"I'm not going to ever be who I was before." Kellin's voice sounded almost bored, and his eyes were following the sluggish clouds across the dusty blue sky.

"That's the whole thing, though. Shit happens, and we don't go back to who we are. We grow up and learn. And change. Life isn't life without change." It hadn't been enough, never was, and Vic watched as Kellin started to swing his legs again. "And I don't want you to be who you were before because I don't know the old you. I love you you, this you." Kellin flicked a pebble off of the cliff. "Can you just move back a bit?" Vic asked, a little desperate. 

Kellin stood up and moved back from the cliff, back towards the rocks that they had climbed to get there. Vic followed him, and they ended up face to face, Vic's hair blown forwards by the wind. He pulled it back and opened his mouth in a smile to tug his hair back but the wind kept blowing it back so Vic just turned around, his back to Kellin, and crossed his arms over his chest.

"We can just stand like this." It shouldn't have been that funny but Kellin couldn't help but start laughing, thinking about how ridiculous everything was. And Vic turned back around, his hair still caught in his mouth , all crazy around his head, taking off in the wind and tearing around his face.

"What?" And Kellin took his hand, finally, apologetic. 

"We can just stand like this." 

It was better that way, of course, but Vic's hair was still going crazy and they were still on top of the cliff which was a little ways off the ground, so they resulted to climbing down the rocks to stare at the shore once again.

"D'you wanna swim?" Vic asked, disregarding the wind that was still doing enough of a job keeping them cool at the bottom of the cliff and the fact that Jenna and Tay had sort of just disappeared. 

"Sure." So Kellin kicked off his jeans and Vic pulled off his shirt and they ended up in the freezing cold lake, racing each other out to the middle of it. 

"Have you ever seen synchronized swimming in the Olympics?" Panted Vic, shaking his wet hair in Kellin's face after they had finally stopped in what they had decided was the center of the lake. 

"Yeah, when the girls wear makeup while they swim? I don't see the point." As Kellin treaded water, he wondered if there were any monsters in the lake, like the Loch Ness Monster or the one named "Champ," or something, that lived in the lake in Vermont. Vic's laughter stopped his worrying, and he smiled when Vic tried to get his words out.

"Just-like. Synchronized swimming. Like..." His laughter got louder and louder as he tried to pull himself together but didn't succeed. "Like, all of us. Synchronized-" He slipped under the water and pulled himself up to hang his arms around Kellin's neck, hugging him there in the water. Vic's laughter died into giggles after a while, and he pulled himself back into the water, and looked straight at Kellin. 

"Kellin."

"Vic."

"I love you."

"I love you too." Vic nodded, as if to confirm it.

"Kellin?"

"Vic?"

"Can I kiss you?"

"Yeah." 

And Vic leaned in this time, hands on the sides of Kellin's face, soaking hair obscuring his own. If they could just stand, or swim, like that forever, neither of them would have had a complaint. 

:::::::

They were driving again. Tay had dyed Jenna's hair bright green in a parking lot and Jenna's hair was done up in a knot on top of her head, the dye soaking into her skin and her hair, respectively. Everything was very nice and very bright and very, positively, okay. 

Kellin felt lighter, happier, different than before. Maybe part of the reason was that Brendon had worked magic on his arm and the scars felt as though they were being hidden from him, in the best way. They had always been so big and garish, so unnecessary, permanent reminders of how he had ruined his life. It felt so much better to not have to see them, and to instead have art on his arm, damn, he felt a little fantastic.

Most of it was because of Vic, because of the way he grinned and the way he talked and the way he thought, god, Kellin was in love. He had thought that he loved the boy who he had smoked with back by the lake in Oregon but he had come to realize how shallow the feeling was. He hadn't loved him. He did love Vic.

Today, they were trying to play charades while Brendon drove. Jack and Alex had arrived looking tired but happy sometime shortly before Brendon had threatened to leave without them, as if they were telepathic and knew that everyone was planning on abandoning them.

Kellin had wanted to talk to Jack again but hadn't gotten the chance, Jenna had had to dye her hair and they had spent way too long driving around and looking for a Sally's because, apparently, the only dye Jenna would allow in her hair was Ion Color Brilliance and she had to find the exact color. And then Ryan had had to consult their maps, they always did, because they wanted to find these sand dunes and a certain beach and Brendon had thrown a mini hissy fit and it had been rightfully annoying for Kellin and Vic, who had nothing to distract themselves with.

The sun spun over their heads as they drove south, voices mingling, gazes being traded; Kellin wondered the last time he had felt this right. After a while, Jenna's green dye faded into her skin and Ryan said that they were nearing the sand dunes and all of them wondered why they even needed to go to the sand dunes. According to Ryan, they were a very photogenic site. No one else cared very much.

When they finally arrived, Jenna and Tay announced that they were going to wash out Jenna's hair dye right then and there to see if it would stain the sand, while Ryan took their camera and Brendon and set off up the dunes. Kellin snatched Jack before he could run away, and held him back as Vic and Alex wandered off into the sand. Alex felt like they were C3P0 and R2D2. 

"What happened?" Kellin asked Jack immediately, gesturing off in the direction that Alex had gone.

"Listen," Jack started, sounding a lot more energetic than he had the previous night, "do you know that Vic and Alex were there listening to us last night? Alex heard-fucking-everything! All of it!" Apparently, that wasn't a bad thing.

"And?" Kellin pushed, sort of nervous as he awaited Jack's answer.

"We talked."

"And?"

"And it's okay now." It had been that easy? Kellin watched as Jack shrugged easily, and came to the conclusion that Jack and Alex would never ever break up, and live gloriously and happily together until the end of time.

Jack wanted to go off and find Alex and Kellin didn't want to climb the sand dunes, so he hung around by the van and listened to Jenna and Tay yell at each other about hair dye. After about five minutes of that, Brendon Urie came to his rescue.

Sort of.

He came flying down the dunes on what looked like a sheet of metal, screaming at the top of his lungs, headed right towards the van. Kellin watched in alarm as he tried to slow himself down by pushing his arms into the sand, but only succeeded in scalding his skin against the burning grains.

"Fuck!" He howled, diving off of the sled-like thing. "Aaaah!" He screamed from where he had landed in the sand, and bounced back up right away, shaking his arms and legs as if they were covered in ants. " What a fucking rush! Kellin," he panted, beaming. "You need to try this." Ryan convinced him to do it by saying that he would only have to once, and Brendon convinced him to do it by saying that they could shop for fireworks afterwards. The latter won him over.

And besides, it was just like sledding except the snow was hot, not cold.

So Kellin followed Brendon up the dune, which took maybe twenty minutes because it was so damn hot and slippery and Brendon's foot kept hitting Kellin's hand and they would both collapse into a pile of laughter, which would move them even farther back down.

When they finally reached the top, Ryan was waiting very impatiently, tossing their camera from hand to hand.

"Sand ruins cameras," Kellin advised them, glad that he didn't have anything expensive and digital to drop into the sand. Ryan stopped throwing their camera and told Kellin to get onto the piece of scrap metal.

"What if I die?" He asked, staring down at the drop below him.

"You won't," Ryan said right away. 

"You might-" Brendon began, but was cut off by Ryan, who was busy thinking about how cool their photos would look with some proper editing.

"You're fine," Ryan snapped, mainly at Brendon, and proceeded to shove Kellin without any warning.

And there he went, hot sand flying in his face, his hands loosening their grip on the sides already. The bottom of the sand dune disappeared from underneath him, causing only the slightest bit of fear, and then he was in the parking lot, the sheet of metal skidding and sparking across the ground; Jenna was doubled over laughing, green hair dye all over her. Kellin ended up lying with his back on the ground of the parking lot, hands over his face, laughing so hard that he was crying.

Tay, also laughing, stumbled her way over to him. She seemed like she was about to ask him something, but gave up because she was laughing too hard to speak. She sat down next to him and sat, laughing, while Brendon and Ryan tried to get down the dune as fast as possible, not completely realizing the hilarity of what was going on in the parking lot.

Jenna, who had hair dye smeared all over her arms and face, sunk down to the hot ground to join the rest of them, and buried her face in her green-tinged hands.

It took about twenty minutes for them to stop laughing.

Jenna had been trying to explain exactly why it was so funny, none of them exactly wanted the exact breakdown of what had been funny, but kept laughing through her description. When she was more hyper than usual, her voice got higher, and she was almost at unbearable pitches. Then came the essential question that Kellin had been waiting for the whole time, lead on by Brendon's sly grin and the way he seemed to be avoiding Ryan's eye contact.

"Want to go firework shopping?"

:::::::

Before they went down to the beach, Ryan looked around and quickly covered up the van's licence plates by tucking paper bags into the grill of the car and the edge of the trunk. When asked why they had just committed this action, they didn't bring up the fireworks but said it was just in case the cops came after them for any reason.

Ryan refused to say the word firework. Ryan refused to admit that they were setting them off, and resolved to sit alone in silence when they were set up. Brendon had poked and teased about it, but Ryan had laughed before turning their tone serious and saying, "this is really illegal and could get us thrown in-"

And Brendon had shushed them before proceeding to wink.

"We'll be okay."

They were okay, and were down on a beach that Jenna had found while wandering down a strip of the highway to find a trash can because she refused to litter or make their van any messier. When they had first started driving, Ryan had gone on for quite some time about how everyone was going to keep the van clean, and it was already looking just a little messy.

Just a bit.

And so there they were, down on the beach, the sun casting shadows across the sand. Tay, Jack, Alex, and Ryan were trying to make a fire on a pile of sticks that they had found somewhere in the trees. Jenna, Brendon, Kellin, and Vic were sitting further down on the beach, admiring Brendon's firework collection and talking about the possibility of alien invasions. It was then when Jenna asked: do you guys want to try something?

It involved Brendon lying flat on his back in the sand with his arms crossed over his chest, like he was about to be set into a coffin.

"Breathe in, and you've gotta totally let go, okay? Just, no holding back. Relax yourself completely."

"Okay," Brendon said, taking a deep breath as Jenna counted out. On "three," Jenna pushed down as hard as she could on his chest, resulting in a hyena-like terrifying laugh that was reminiscent of a shriek coming out of Brendon's body. It was loud enough to cause Ryan to look up from the fire that seemed to be coming along, somehow, to stare at Brendon rolling around in the sand. Kellin and Vic were laughing, holding onto each other like Jenna was coming to hurt them with her laugh-inducing hands. After Brendon went twice more and Vic tried it, Kellin was forced to. Jack, who wasn't the best at focusing, had wandered over to watch the show.

Kellin took his deep breath and Jenna counted him out before she lowered his hands onto his chest, pressing hard on his arms. Brendon went into hysterics again as soon as Kellin started laughing, and Kellin sat up immediately after Jenna had sat back onto the sand, tearing up and looking at Vic, who was intensely focused on the way Kellin looked when he forgot about everything he hated about himself and just laughed. No holding back.

:::::::

They made their fire and talked around it and ate burnt vegan marshmallows and watched the ocean and kept their eyes on Brendon and his fireworks. After the fire had died down and conversation had ran its way back to aliens, it always did, Vic leaned back into Kellin's chest and relaxed there.

It was then that their party broke up. Jenna and Tay wanted to sit on top of the van and discuss what the government would do if aliens appeared, what kinds of weapons they had, and to (possibly) make out. Jack and Alex wanted to "go for a walk." No one ever knew what that meant. Ryan wanted to take cool nighttime pictures and Brendon had to come along, of course, he always did.

They left Kellin and Vic in the sand, their limbs twisted together, smoke from the fire in their lungs, stars heavy in their eyes.

"Brendon left his fireworks." Vic felt as though someone else was speaking for him. Brendon had hidden a few of them but had left some of them scattered around, propped up on their stands.

"Yeah." And all they needed was Vic's book of matches to light up the air in white and silver and red and blue and it was loud and bright and brought both of them back to life but only enough to realize how each other looked under the lights, how it was like heaven and those were Vic's eyes and those were Kellin's lips and they could hear Jenna laughing from all the way down on the beach and then they kissed and fuck-

The metaphorical fireworks were real this time, set off over their heads and fizzling out around them, trails streaking the sky, smoke floating out into the ocean, kiss kiss kiss, hair, hand, face, lip, kiss, tongue, skin, fire. Stars.

:::::::

Kellin had that look on his face, the one that Vic had begun to learn to place. He was sat sort of leaned away from Vic, arms around himself in the defensive way that he did unknowingly. He had been so happy yesterday, smiling and laughing and talking almost without self consciousness, like everything had been okay. Everything had been okay.

And Kellin wasn't happy at that exact moment and he was telling himself that he had no reasons to be sad anymore and wanted to beat himself up and curse himself out and cry, because fuck, it really wasn't that hard to feel good. It was just hard for him to feel good. And he didn't want to have depression, he hadn't asked for it, he didn't know when it had materialized and when he had realized that it wasn't just a bad week. It wasn't just the fact that he was self harming, it wasn't that he was binge eating, it wasn't that he was getting sexually abused, it was that he had given up. It had come to him in his weakest moment, masquerading as something helpful, something that would make him feel better, something that would keep him company, at least.

So he welcomed it. Because it made him less lonely.

And now it was there when he woke up. It made him pull away from his boyfriend. It made him wonder again why he even had a boyfriend. It made him convince himself that his boyfriend did not want to be his boyfriend.

"Hey." Kellin pulled his hand away from Vic's as soon as it touched him and shivered, pulling his own arms closer around him. "What's up?"

"I don't know why you like me. I don't think you like me. I can't- I don't, I'm sorry." Vic was quiet.

"I'm fat, I'm ugly, I'm stupid, I don't care about anyone but myself-" Kellin started, his voice shaking.

"Kell-"

"Looking at me is like looking into a fucking fun house mirror except it's real life, I am so-"

"Kellin-"

"Everything has to be about me, I always make it about me, do I ever ask about you? No, I fuck- I'm so stupid-"

"Kellin- sh-stop! Stop it, oh my god, I don't-" Vic cut himself off and breathed, quickly, they couldn't start this again. "I think if you could see myself through my eyes, you would, you would love yourself so much. Listen, look, I don't care if you're fat. You're still really fucking pretty. I don't care if you've got stretch marks, or scars, or bad memories, or weird habits, or depression, or an eating disorder, if you think you're too much, if you're too big- that doesn't matter, that doesn't mean shit, because you're still perfect." Kellin bit at the inside of his cheek and looked Vic in the eyes, something he hardly ever did.

"You always ask if I'm really in love with you, and why, why I'm in love with you, what I see in you, all this stuff. I could give you a million fucking reasons, Kellin, the way your eyes look when you smile, the way your voice sounds when you say "love," because it's got a good connotation, you know, the shade of your skin, you're- you, you're so brave and oh my god I wish I was as brave as you, I wish- you may not feel confident but you seem like you are, so much. When you showed up just with short sleeves and fresh stitched up cuts all over your arms, I was- I don't know, I wished that I could have my bruises and cuts and not care about them, Kellin." God, oh god.

"You ask why I love you, and honestly, it just happened. I just really liked the way you were and listen, we don't get to pick who we fall in love with. But if we could get to choose, I would pick you anyways. I don't care what falling in love with you comes with, if it's crying together at midnight, or breakdowns, relapsing, none of that matters because it's you and it's me, and-and it's all we really need. I would always choose you. You're the-the best thing in my life, Kellin, I love you. I would always, always choose you."


End file.
